Theatre Australia 2(9) April 1978

ralia’s magazine ofthe performing arts

A pril 1978 $1.50

lliealre Australia Interview : R ex C ra m p h o rn O ld T o te crisis M erry W idow Sw an L ake

C o m p reh en siv e Review Section in clu d in g film , b a lle t, o p era, etc. N atio n al G u id e

PA R A C H U TE P R O D U C TIO N S in association with the

A U S TR A LIA N E LIZA B E TH A N THEATRETRUST presents

THE MELBOURNE TH EA TRE C O M PANY PRODUCTION OF

»USA, FISH, STAS AND VI

by PAM GEMS

Starring Nancye Hayes, Carol Burns, Pat Bishop and Vivienne G arrett

Perth Playhouse March 30th - April 22nd Adelaide Union Theatre April 26th - May 20th *The Sydney Theatre Royal May 30th - June 25th *By arrangement with the MLC Theatre Trust

T h e a tre

April 1978 Volume 2 No.9

D epartm en ts

F eatu res

2 5 7

Comment Quotes and Queries Whispers, Rumours and Facts

49 50

I.T.I. Roundup Guide: Theatre, Opera Dance

8 10 10 12

A u s tra lia

Old Tote Crisis — Douglas Flintoff examines the situation behind the Totes losses.

Illusion Comique — Rex Cramphorn in interview with Roger Pulvers.

National Theatre Award Nominations Theatre Training — Richard Mills and Bea Star give contrary views of N.I.D.A.

S potlight

3

Spotlight on Stephen Barry, Robert A lexander and Robert Van Macklenburg

In te rn atio n al

48

‘Where are the writers?”

Desmond O’Grady in Rome

P lay scrip t

28

A Happy and Holy Occasion John O’Donoghue

O pera

41

David Gyger’s Survey: Australian Opera Summer Season

B allet

39

Australian Ballet: Swan Lake William Shoubridge

T h e a tre Review s

17

W.A. The Norman Conquests Othello & The Rape o f Lucretia The Wakefield Mystery Days

19

VIC. Rock 'ola Melbourne Survey Dusa, Fish, Stas & Vi ‘B reaker’Moran t

22

QLD. Flight Path Small Change

23

S.A. Adelaide Survey Oedipus

25

N.S.W. Marxisms, Stubble, Everyman Edith Piaf Ned Kelly Sydney Survey

Film

43

Elizabeth Riddell/Terry Owen

Records

45

Roger Coveil

Books

46

John McCallum

Act II

ratio n al Theatre Opera Dance G u id e p50

T h e a tre A u s tra lia

E d ito r :

Robert Page

Lucy Wagner Bruce Knappett A r t D ir e c t o r : David Hill E x e c u t iv e E d ito r :

The Award season is upon us again with the National Critics’ Circle having just presented their gongs for 1977 and the nominations for the National Theatre Awards to be presented at this year’s Playwrights’ Conference in Canberra, appearing in this issue of Theatre Australia and the current Equity Newsletter as well.

Awards are accepted in most areas of the entertainment business, but in the theatre world mention of them tends to excite vigorous argument, perhaps largely because they are still at a comparitively youthful stage by comparison with their film, TV and writer's counterparts. In ten years perhaps there will be no brouhaha and people will wonder, if they still remember, what all the fuss was about.

Already the Critics’ Circle presentations have been judged by Marietta as “a farce" (see John West’s reply in Quotes and Queries) and in Melbourne Ray Lawler has refused his award for The Doll trilogy. John Sumner is reported to have said that had the award that the MTC as a whole received been a personal one for him he would have responded exactly as Mr Lawler did.

The whole matter seems to stem from a fairly bitter round of argument last year when the critics responded unfavourably to the classic season at the Athenaeum for which these two gentlemen shared the directorial responsibility.

The belief is that if an award is accepted when the critics are positive, one is obliged to accept their remarks when they are negative.

There is not the time to open up the whole critics vs professionals debate yet again, but the implication seems to be that the critic is merely the front line publicist for the theatre, and that earned the rebuff from Shaw that “a dramatic critic is the servant of a high art, and not a mere advertiser of entertainment", and it should be recommended for the MTC’s attention that there is an article by the American critic Richard Gilman on “The Necessity for Destructive Criticism" wherein he says “you do not patronise or act generously towards an artistic accomplishment — you identify it”. The award to Ray Lawler was a recognition, with no strings attached, of one of the unquestionable peaks of Australian drama; it seems to have been rejected not because of an in principle disagreement, but pique at an ungenerous response to a season of plays.

It is this recognition aspect of awards which is the important one and one overlooked by those who derogate them for an assumed competitive aspect. The Doll trilogy was a major achievement of the MTC (soon to be screened by Channel 7), as is the contribution of La Mama, who shared the Victorian award, to Australian theatre over the past ten years, a decade celebrated last year. Elsewhere in drama Troupe, in Adelaide, was acclaimed for its 2 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

continuing presentation of new and especially Australian plays, with its “consistently high standard of presentation”; Joan Whalley in Queensland for the immense work she has done personally for the furtherance of drama in that state; and in Western Australia the award has gone to Helen Weller for her individual “effort and commitment" to keeping Artlook magazine afloat (we send personal congratulations, being all too aware of the dedication that takes). In New South Wales the award went to Liviu Ciulei for his magnificent production of The Lower Depths, unquestionably the high point of the Tote’s '77 season. Pleasingly it isn't just an award for an outsider, but one which “should be seen as a tribute to a talented Australian cast and to the ability of (those) actors to respond to good direction.” In Tasmania Peter Wilson took the award for his direction, with the Tasmanian Puppet Theatre production of Momma's Little Horror Show (see TA July 1977).

With the inauguration of the National Professional Theatre Awards last year, the argument of proliferation was raised, and in the press by Len Radic of The Age. This again seems unfair when, as the rejoinder said “two does not make a crowd”. There are many differences between the two awards; one is from the critics who are finally giving single accolades at the end of the year in several categories of the performing arts, the other is industry recognition in six categories from each state, in theatre alone. One, then, is from without, the other from within; the one can go to any achievement of excellence in Australia (hence the Ciulei award), the other can only go to Australian residents. Comparisons are not invidious, each are effective in their own way, and if each stimulate the press to give more coverage to the performing arts and their artists, then both should be supported.

Sadly this issue is the first after the departure of Playhouse Press from Theatre Australia, and the loss of the Melbourne team who did so much to achieve such accolades as “the best theatre magazine in the world” from Ian Herbert, the editor of the international Who's Who o f Theatre published from London. After the unfounded doubts expressed in Marietta’s column in The Australian (Leb 18-19 1978) we would like to assure readers that the reversion to Theatre Publications, who first published the magazine and have continued to provide all the editorial, will not affect its continuity. The magazine is strengthening its circulation all the time and increasingly being recognised and sought abroad. Prom this issue Theatre Australia is to be published monthly in the last week of the month prior to that which appears on the cover. All enquiries should be addressed to the Editorial Office.

A s s o c ia te E d ito r :

A d v is o r y B o a r d :

John Bell, Graeme Blundell, Ellen Brave, Katharine Brisbane, Vivian Chalwyn, Gordon Chater, John Clark. W.A. Enright. Lynda Gray, Jack Hibberd, Ken Horler, Garrie Hutchinson. Robert Jordan, Philip Mason.

Stan Marks. Jake Newby. Phil Noyce, Raymond Omodei. Philip Parsons, Diana Sharp. Ken Southgate, Raymond Stanley. Elizabeth Sweeting, John Timlin, Tony Trench. Guthrie Worby, Richard Wherrett

Theatre Publications Jaki Gothard Jaki Gothard/Sue Manger

P u b lis h e r : M a n a g e r:

A d v e r t is in g :

C o rre s p o n d e n ts :

Editors (0491 67-4470 Raymond Stanley (031419-1204 Q ld .: Don Batchelor (07) 269-3018 W .A .: Joan Ambrose (09) 299-6639 S .A .: Michael Morley (08) 275-2204 N .S .W .: V ic .:

Theatre Australia gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Australia Council, the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the New South Wales Cultural Grants Board, the Arts Grants Advisory Committee of South Australia, the Queensland Cultural Activities Department, the Victorian Ministry of the Arts and the Assistance of the University of Newcastle.

M a n u s c r ip ts :

Manuscripts and editorial correspondence should be forwarded to the editorial office, 80 Elizabeth Street, Mayfield, N.S.W. 2304. Telephone (049) 67 4470.

Whilst every care is taken of manuscripts and visual material supplied for this magazine, the publishers and their agents accept no liability for loss or damage which may occur. Unsolicited manuscripts and visual material will not be returned unles accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope. Opinions expressed in signed articles are not necessarily those of the editors.

S u b s c r ip tio n s a n d A d v e r t is in g :

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Theatre Australia is published by Theatre Publications Ltd., 80 Elizabeth Street, Mayfield, N.S.W. 2304. Telephone (0491 67-4470. Distributed by subscription and through theatre foyers etc. by Theatre Publications Ltd. and to newsagents throughout Australia by Gordon and Gotch (A’asia) Ltd., Melbourne, Sydney. Wholly set up by and printed by Tell & Sell Promotions. © Theatre Publications Ltd. All rights reserved except where specified. The cover price is maximum recommended retail price only. Registered for posting as a periodical — category B.

c Stephen Barry new director of the National Theatre Company, Perth talks to Margot Luke

Stephen Barry Chatting to a new broom has its problems. So many of the questions are concerned with intentions rather than achievement. Will our Theatre be in good hands? Will you be able to carry out your bright visions?

Stephen Barry, new Artistic Director of the National Theatre Company at the Perth Playhouse is very much aware that the promise of a dazzling new future is an intangible thing.

But already he has set about providing tokens of a new era with attention to peripheral matters.

Good relations with the press. A pleasant noshup, reinforced by very professional press-kits giving setting out past qualifications and future plans. A bright new sign saying Playhouse flashes on and off, lending a touch of theatreland to an otherwise drab Pier Street. Photo­ graphs of the first production have a West End gloss about them. Catering to thirsty theatre patrons (in this hottest summer in Perth’s history) is streamlined, the incompetent muddlers behind the bar have disappeared but the friendly and efficient front of house staff remain and are duly appreciated. Audiences will be encouraged to become regular patrons on a subscription basis.

So the packaging is fine. How about the contents? The first season shows cautious balancing: for the Festival in February, the Ayckbourn trilogy, The Norman Conquests. A visit from the M.T.C. with Dusa, Fish etc. and Williamson’s The Club. Eater there’ll be Streetcar and The Ghost Train, and another

Australian work, O’Donoghue’s A Happy and Holy Occasion. The Greenroom similarly balanced with Gotcha, hoping to attract a youth audience, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Beckett's Waiting fo r Godot, and finally Hancock’s Last Half Hour.

The already active Theatre-in-Education will be expanded, and a series of Lunchtime Poetry Readings and Concerts will be introduced.

Stephen Barry’s own preferences lie in the direction of Shaw, Ibsen and Chekhov, and he has no burning desire to present earth-shattering new interpretations of Shakespeare.

His approach to the job is ungimmicky, professional, energetic and friendly. Despite the innovatory use of a businesslike public relations organisation, there is an emphasis on personal contact: phone calls are returned promptly, interviews squeezed in despite ringing telephones and frenetic activity. His background seems almost extravagantly suitable — not only was his mother an actress with the Old Vic, but his father. Sir Gerald Barry, was the wartime editor of The News Chronicle and DirectorGeneral of the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Why did he come to isolated W.A. suffering what many people would see as an interruption of an already distinguished career in England (working at the Mermaid and National Theatres, also at Guildford, Cheltenham, and most recently completing a four year stint as Artistic Director of the Harrogate Theatre Company.) Wanderlust and challenge, he says.

After Harrogate (pop. 65,000) Perth is more like a large provincial town in England. In Harrogate he achieved the goals he had set himself'— four years being a kind of optimum period for establishing patterns and getting things running smoothly — after that complacency sets in. The challenge of Perth, of course, is not merely the size. He feels that the theatre scene in Australia is in a state of flux, less fettered by tradition than the repertory movement in England. He sees his task as being sensitive to the undercurrent of demand and satisfying major tastes, but also developing wider tastes in audiences.

The first season as announced leans heavily toward the former. Clearly Barry is using the first year to feel his way, and it seems both tactful and intelligent to have the first two big Australian productions presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company who created them. The third Australian play A Happy and Holy Occasion will surface in June, directed by Stephen Barry himself.

If one wants to affix a label to the new approach, one might call it more audienceorientated. The subscription booking aims at

audience loyalty, and at the same time the practice of engaging a cast for each individual play shows more concern for artistic demands than job-security for actors. This decision to have no permanent resident company has already caused a certain amount of controversy.

Previous seasons had often been marred by squeezing round actors into square parts, and it is tempting to think that from the audience’s point of view the change must be beneficial. The question is, of course, whether actors will stay in Perth without a firm contract, or rush off to Sydney and Melbourne with their more varied possibilities.

Stephen Barry does not believe that the actor will be disadvantaged. "We will foster local talent, he says, and our aim will be two-way exchange with other companies. I do not think Perth should think of itself as an importer of talent only, but an exporter as well. The point should be reached where a Perth production would establish its identity to the point where it will be invited to appear in other states”.

Will he encourage local writers? Yes, there will be workshopping, but more practically, he has already engaged Richard Tull to write for the Theatre in Education wing of the company.

Apart from this, he has deliberately refrained from promising the discovery of good new Australian plays. If a good new play is discovered in Perth it's obviously going to be Australian. After all, an English Company would not promise to premiere only good new English plays.

In his ten years in the theatre (he's 32), what has been the highlight, I ask. No hesitation at all. Directing Sir Alec Guinness in an interesting, though unlucky play — Time out o f Mind, by Brigid Boland. Watching Sir Alec he learnt about directing and acting, much of it a matter of silences, relaxing, and listening.

The Ayckbourn trilogy will be our first look at Barry in action. Hardly a play of silences — why did he choose it? Again, the idea of challenge applies. To the actors, remembering which of the plays they are doing — their roles are the same in each, with individual developments of character. There will be one marathon performance of all three plays in one day, but previous to that there are two week seasons of each play and finally they will go into alternating repertoire. The challenge to the audience will be to remember what has gone before. He regards it as consolidating all that’s best in Ayckbourn, being funny and entertaining enough to attract audiences, but clever and painstaking enough to be taken seriously as a demonstration piece for a new director to show his mettle.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

3

Robert Alexander Lucy Wagner Now you see him ___

Robert Alexander Photo: June Cann Management.

A lot of audiences — especially Sydney audiences — have enjoyed performances by Robert Alexander, but out of those, I wonder how many can put a face to the name. Not that the performances weren't enjoyable and memorable in themselves, but Robert finds himself to an extent in the double bind of a certain kind of character actor; that of subsuming his own personality in performance so fully into that of his stage character that the creative artist behind it is forgotten. The greats he himself most admires evidence a similar situation; Ralph Richardson is now a household name through sheer longevity, but how many of Leonard Rossiter’s roles spring to mind?

A need to become very much part of something has been a trade mark of Robert Alexander’s work, from his first chosen career of music teacher which took him round the world.

One of the people most keen for him to take the plunge into theatre was childhood and alltime friend Richard Wherrett — “he’s been a great risk taker all his life” — and they worked together early on at the ‘Q’ Theatre in Sydney in a production of Balance o f Payments with Maggie Dence and Peter Rowley. Also at the Q, were a couple of parts in Too Old For Spring, a mini musical written by the Resurgents group, a prison warder called Wally, and the camp ghost of Ned Kelly!

Working at Nimrod from 1975 consolidated Robert’s casting type as a character actor; a straight part in Richard Wherrett’s Richard III meant playing in rep in John Bell’s Much Ado. Don John’s evil, moustache-twirling side-kick Borachio was a memorable role, and one that brought a great feeling of belonging to a company especially when that production played at The Space in Adelaide. Even Gordon McDougall, that well-seasoned player, said he’d never experienced anything like it when the last night audience gathered applauding round the edge of the stage, while the cast, stood, moved to tears by the recognition.

4 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Two rounds of Treasure Island — this time a goodie, Dr Livesey — were “an unforgettable experience” as was Inner Voices in a very different role — the lugubrious Leo who got his throat cut.

1976 in Newcastle with the first year of the Hunter Valley Theatre Company proved an exhausting and extending experience in offering a great range of roles: from an ex-admiral in The Floating World, a play which deeply shocked the outlying Hunter Valley regions; to Dame Gertrude in Hamlet on Ice, an unbeatable pantomime performance; to a moving and sympathetic Mr Strang in Equus; back in time to the youthful and charming gentleman caller in Glass Menagerie: the harrassed, cuckolded academic in Bedfellows; simple, Irish Denny in the acclaimed local play A Happy and Holy Occasion; and finally singer actor and dancer in an end of year revue Four On the Floor, the title of which summed up the state of the company at that time.

As the company reduced to three actors with Tony Sheldon and Kerry Walker and director Terry Clarke, and they faced the daily possibility of liquidation the group feeling tightened, sometimes stiflingly so. Perhaps Robert Alexander is right when he says he thinks he’s a late developer. He finds he’s getting over the feeling of needing to belong to an entity and able to take things much more as they come. But he doesn’t plan to stop submerging himself in his characters, “that’s when you know you've got them right”.

Robert Van Macklenburg Joan Ambrose The critics nomination in Western Australia for the Best Actor One of the outstanding qualities Robert Van Macklenburg has as an actor, is an extra­ ordinary ability to project the part he is playing through movement.

He moves with the exactitude and skill of a trained dancer — which he is not. So apparently it is an innate quality that allows him to create character with hands, eyes, voice and face, but above all with an extra dimension of body expression that is rare. His Napoleon stance was A Man o f Destiny; his interpretation of Marlowe’s Edward the Second portrayed an emotionally and physically vulnerable weakling, especially in his childlike dependence before his death; his Blondin in Allegria’s Crossing Niagra created the illusion of tension over a chasmic void; and by contrast his Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore was a physical bumblewit.

As an actor Robert Van Macklenburg has a range and depth of performance, but it wasn’t so long ago that he was mostly cast as a juvenile.

And in the beginning this seemed as if it would be a major stumbling block to his career.

“The problem was” he said, “that at the Mercury Theatre in New Zealand where I trained, it was a sort of apprenticeship/bursary system whereby the theatre was given a grant to train four young actors a year, and at the end of two years the Company had the option of employing the students. But obviously there were always too many juveniles for the Company to absorb. Eventually the only permanent work I could get was as a stage manager. Which I hated. But it brought me to Australia.”

It was as a stage manager that he came to Perth for the first time, and eventually he became contracted to the Playhouse and was offered a juvenile part in Peter Kenna’s A Hard God beautifully produced by Terry Clarke. It was in that play that the promise of the future could be seen in the performance that he gave.

There were more small parts and then the opportunity to play Alan Strang, the emotionally wracked boy who blinds the horses, in Equus. This part proved to be rather more than Robert expected. It became a cause celebre.

Equus is something that he is prepared to talk about now, but it was obviously very traumatic.

Although Equus had been performed all over the world, without any objection to the nude scenes, and even had two seasons in Perth to packed houses, it was while the play was on country tour that complaints were made to the police, with the resulting charge of indecent exposure. Although the charges were eventually dismissed “At the time,” he said, “it was a pretty horrendous experience, mixed with total disbelief that it could be happening at all.” It was a difficult period and it took some time for the effect it had upon him, to fade.

But at about this time, the juvenile roles were replaced by offers of parts that were varied and complex. For this we can thank John Milson, director of The Hole in the Wall who quite early on realized that Robert was an actor who could be developed. Robert gives John Milson the credit for the ways in which his talents have grown and his levels of interpretation have deepened.

“After thinking, at one time, that I might never get into theatre, I feel I have really been very lucky. I have had marvellous people to work with. And in small companies there’s a lot of rapport. At The Hole there’s always a good feeling — and in working in such plays as Long Day's Journey into Night and M y Fat Friend at The Regal, on each occasion there, there were only four of us, but it was a fantastically good and close working experience.”

Robert Van Macklenburg has come a long way since he had “a cough and a spit” in Faustus just a few years ago. Now what?

“I want to continue to do as much as I can, as varied as possible, and to go on extending and developing”.

Sydney, I paid to see it one Wednesday, and was amazed to find most of my rewrites intact and uncredited in what appeared to be forty per cent of an appalling evening. Deciding Reg alone should not be blamed for this ear-splitting pogrom on our national history, I generously sued and await developments with interest.”

BLOCK BUSTER SCHEDULE

Carol Burns (Fish), Vivienne Garrett (Vi), Pat Bishop (Stas) and Nancye Hayes (Dusa) in the MTC production of Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, photo by David Parker.

REG NOT BLAMED ALONE BOB ELLIS: “In late 1973 when preliminary tapes of Ned Kelly, a zinc-bright labour of love by Reg Livermore (in one high tingling moment Ned aches for the office of king, while his sister Kate likewise pines for the powers of a bird, as those would enable her to fly), crushingly musicked into multi-national portentousness by Patrick Flynn of Kent and Michael Carlos of California, and raucously sung by the Superstar cast and Janice Slater in the rich accents of Liverpool and Alabama, proved insufficiently intellectual for the taste of Clyde Packer, its patient entrepreneur, Flynn, my brazenly gifted collaborator on The James Dossier, Caddie and Sunday Too Far A way, paid me a thousand dollars to rewrite as much of it as seemed retrievable. Without much pleasure I did so, force feeding seven songs through my cheesegrater mind and my rhyming dictionary while Reg howled abuse and Clyde nodded corpulently, and writing three new ones, “What Else Is New”, “The Blood of the Irish” and “Queen Victoria’s Fuzz”. The record was cut and released, in which, correctly, I got a credit for Additional Lyrics, and the designated stage director Sir Robert Helpmann and Reg went off to London together to discuss in depth a new concept of the show emphasising Ned’s penchant for dressing up in women’s clothes. I heard nothing more for three years until the opening in Adelaide of an eponymous electric musical, without my credit on it, led me to believe that Reg had reverted to his initial inspirations. Uninvited to the opening night in

M IC K R O DGER: “I don’t think I’ve ever been so busy. Right at this moment I have thirty plays to read for the Playwrights’ Conference and actors and directors to cast whilst working on the biggest production I’ve ever undertaken.

In fact I think Richard III is probably one of the biggest productions the MTC has ever presented. It’s certainly a block buster of a show with a cast of twenty five. But I am very excited about being artistic director of the Playwrights' Conference and about participating in the artistic direction of the MTC during John Sumner’s absence. Trouble is there just aren't enough hours in the day. I have to stick to a very tight schedule: I’m trying to read an average of two plays a day (over breakfast, lunch or whenever I have a break) »and working on Richard III at night.”

R IC H A R D W H E R R E T T :

Mainly I uck by a new attitude to Australia while I London. People were saying, yes it sounds like an interesting place to go. When I left seven years ago it was considered as something akin to a visit to hell. I must say this touched my patriotic heart strings. It's part of the political scheme and at a national level, but it is a lot to do with the Australian film and theatre situation - but nothing to do with the Ft i . a , , ting, they ve got television shows terrible ratings!

At the first preview of Benjamin Franklin the audience cheered — and I got the shock of my life. I thought it must be a mistake! Then they cheered at each succeeding preview, and on the opening night, and it became more and more meaningful. I think it’s fair to say that 95% of the reviews were favourable, and they were universally raving about Gordon personally.

Gordon is of course delighted; he is prepared to do the play wherever he is asked, he enjoys doing it so much. There’s very strong planning

for the show to go to New York at some point, possibly the end of this year.”

AWARD REJECTED_____________ Ray Lawler was awarded the Critic’s Circle Drama Award for Victoria, but refused to accept it.

RAY LAW LER: It would be hypocritical and inconsistent of me to keep the award. I don’t want anyone to feel awkward, it’s a personal decision and not to be taken as one made by the MTC. I’m not very much in favour of awards; I think that if you accept such awards, one is recognising the right of critics to make a definite opinion. If one accepts that right when they’re in your favour then one must accept it when they go against you. Dozens of times I have read things, not necessarily about our shows, that I don’t agree with.”

PLAYS FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT PETER C O LLIN G W O O D (excerpt from The Cat and the Canary Programme): “The 1978 policy for the Parade Theatre is quite clearly to present plays which we believe you, our audience, will enjoy. Not plays calculated to “instruct”, to be “socially relevant” or which “cry out to be done”, but just those which will make you feel on leaving the theatre “I am so glad we came. I really enjoyed that!” It has been said that we will be doing “popular plays”.

Though a convenient label, I feel that the term implies a choice based primarily on the play’s proven popularity with audiences elsewhere, usually overseas. What is important, of course, is the popularity of a play here in Sydney. The idea that a West End or New York success is necessarily a success in Sydney has, one hopes, been finally exploded. In fact the reverse is sometimes true — a moderate success or even failure overseas can appeal greatly to audiences here.

“Commercial plays” is an even less satisfactory term. It has a cynical ring, implying that it doesn't matter whether a play is good or bad, provided it has got something which will pull in the public. Such a policy ignores a need for quality, and surely quality should always be a prime consideration in the selection of plays for this company.”

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

5

Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne. We are also at present, actively seeking new members, and ask them to contact me on (02) 44-6212.”

FASCINATING COINCIDENCES!

Brian Young.

RIP IT OUT BRIAN YO U N G : “After Prisoner o f Second Avenue, I’m really pleased about directing the next play at the Ensemble, called Vanity. It’s a three-handed female play, you see them just out of school, graduating from university and then finally about six years later.

Basically it’s about the explosion of the myth that being popular is the most desirable thing.

By new playwright Jack Heffner, it was only written at the end of last year and takes an unusual form; it has three vanity tables on stage and the cast set them up. put their makeup on there, and change the scenes. I'm trying to get an all female crew also, I'm sure they will be able to help me a lot from their own experiences. The cast are Kathy Thomson, Bronwyn Fullerton and Debbie Trengove. We were going to do Happy Families when this arrived.

Yes, it’s good to be in Sydney after Tasmania; much more exciting, it’s a very pacey city, I think it’s faster than London. But it’s a whore of a city, doesn't give you anything, you have to rip it out. Everyone’s saying it’s so good to have you in Sydney, but there’s no actual work! Though there are rumblings about film and TV work later in the year.”

M E R V Y N R U T H E R FO R D : The most fascinating aspect of Departmental so far is a series of coincidences which have occured in relation to the play and the MTC. When I met the director. Bruce Myles, we toned at one stage to talking about football, only to find that in successive years we had played rugby league for the same football club in Sydney.

It was also while watching football that I mentioned to fellow Eastern Suburbs supporter Alexander Buzo, that I had submitted some plays to the MTC. Buzo was unusually non­ committal, but on seeing the programme for the MTC season I noticed that his new play Makassar R eef will precede mine.

The most poignant of the coincidences affecting the play deals with its eventual acceptance by the MTC, but that’s a story on its ow n ..

A ILS A C A R P E N T E R , Administrator, Designers’ Association in the Performing Arts.

"The Designers’ Association has been in existence for some time, but last year really got going again with a whole new committee. Now it is to reach something of a milestone with a major exhibition of costumes, designs, set models, hand props and photographs from T.V., theatre and film. The works on show at the Opera House Exhibition Hall, 8th-21st May are from thirty of the members of the Association, drawn from all over the country, Perth, 6

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

JO H N W E S T , Head of the Critics' Circle: “There is no obligation on critics to join the Critics' Circle; they are invited to do so and those who don't do not invalidate the people who do join. Maria Prerauer was a prominent member of the music critics’ arm until she left after the last awards.

Our funding comes from the Arts Education Fund — it is $14,000 this financial year and that has to pay for every expense in every state. It is not taking money from some aspiring student, though I think Maria thought the money would be better used if involved in more direct application.

None of the Sydney Morning Herald music critics ever belonged to the Circle; Roger Coveil was always against it, but it has Australian, Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph representation. Dance and Drama are both represented from all papers.

The lady has given a new construction to the phrase “Naughty Marietta”!

journey A m ong W omen

'Bailetfs DESIGN EXHIBITION

REPLY TO MARIETTA

THE IASI \NRIE

SPECTRUM FILMS where the shoot ends and the movie begins 141 Penshurst St. Willoughby N.S.W. 2068 (0 2 ) 4 1 2 4 0 5 5

Ray Stanley’s

WHISPERS RUMOURS & /y FACTS

(fr-VO Could be that the Great Australian musical writing team that has been so elusive will turn out to be Barry Ferrier (music) and Frank Flowson (book and lyrics). Their children’s musical The Faraway Land o f Magical Frank, staged at Melbourne’s Total January 1976, has been recorded by E.M.I. with Reg Livermore, Arthur Dignam and John Paul Young. Another children’s musical, The Boy Who Dared to Dream, staged at Northlands Shopping Centre last Christmas with Tom Dysart, Burt Cooper and Anne Pendlebury in the cast, also has been issued as an LP by Crest featuring John Waters,

w

Trevor White, Robin Ramsay and Tom Dysart.

And now Barry and Frank are working on their first adult musical, which will be based on the Melbourne ’20s underworld character Squizzy Taylor. There’s also a Ferrier Flowson screenplay in the wind.

Kenn Brodziak and Robert Ginn of JCWs now overseas finalising details for the Australian production of Annie, having talks with Cyma Rubin about Oh! Kay, and looking at other possibles for Australia. . .Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy likely to be here in 1979 in a stage version of their TV series George and Mildred. . . .With all the TV names being mooted for Australia, wonder why someone doesn’t bring out the Two Ronnies (Barker and Corbett).

They’d surely be a wow. . .So much talk about Ben Travers’ The Bed Before Yesterday being staged here, by the time it is it’ll surely be The Bed Before Tomorrow.

A new trend for titles for musicals? Latest on Broadway is Working, a new musical by Stephen Swartz, who this time around has also written the book and directed. Then there’s Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, which uses classical and contemporary music from such people as Cat Stevens, Neil Diamond, Bach and Mozart. . . Also on

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Unbelievably A Chorus Line is doing much better business in Melbourne than Sydney, with standing room at most performances. And for all those doubters: ballet dancer Garth Welch turns in a stand-out performance as Zach. . .Suzanne Steele later in the year is to star in Orpheus in the Underworld for the Victorian Opera Company, to be directed by Betty Pounder. . . .

Actor Max Gillies is turning producer for the film version of Dimboola. Max may also be seen in the picture too.

Is the pendulum going to swing back to those bygone days when theatres presented curtain raisers? I hear vague murmurings that one of our subsidised companies is going to introduce ‘platform theatre' which, as described to me, sounds very much like the old curtain raisers.

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Titled Timbuktu! it stars Eartha Kitt and Gilbert Price, whom Melbourne theatregoers may recall played one of the leads in the musical Two Gentlemen o f Verona. . .There’s going to be a Broadway revival of the Newley-Bricusse Stop The World / Want to Get Off. Starring Sammy Davis Jnr., it will be called simply Stop the World. . .And Stephen Sondheim’s newest musical will be Sweeney Todd, based on the old melodrama and starring Angela Lansbury.

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THE MAKING OF A DANCE Mikhail Baryshnikov & Carla Fracci in Medea.

Choreographed by John Butler.

Photographed by Thomas Victor.

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Holt Rinehart Winston $20.50

NOTEBOOKS OF MARTHA GRAHAM with an introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross More than a book for dancers or actors, this is, as Nancy Wilson Ross says in her introduction, “ a private compilation of mankind’s collective wisdom” perceived through one woman’s intelligence and imagination.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $39.70

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

7

OLD TOTE CRISIS

There are people who find it gratifying to see the Old Tote facing liquidation. At the time of writing, mid February, heads are nodding wisely all over Australia, as the minds in them contem plate' how the mighty are fallen — a lesson to all lesser theatre companies of the dangers of theatrical imperialism. Sons and daughters of 8 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Sydney, behold, this was the Old Tote, By the time this is read, however, it is probable that the Tote will be on its feet again, if perhaps reeling. In any case the crisis should be over and most of what is reported here may be a m atter for theatre historians, This, then, is simply a report on how things stood four weeks ago.

The crisis is simply a problem of too many commitments and not enough money. The purchase of the million dollar building in O’Riordan St., Alexandria, was prompted by the demands of the Opera House, where there is no rehearsal or workshop space — but there is still a significant mortgage on it. This, combined with a serious failure at the box-office in the second half of 1977 (and I can hardly put it more nicely than that) led to a situation where the Tote would simply run out of money by the end of February 1978. (Even the more or less successful Alan Ayckbourn trilogy. The Norman Conquests fell considerably short of expectations.) Whether there is a more deep seated reason for the problems coming when it did — to be found in the financial management of the company over the last few years — is a matter between the Tote and their accountants, but there is no reason to look for that sort of mismanagement to explain the present crisis.

Indeed, the Tote had expected difficulties.

They had perhaps not anticipated the box-office failures of 1977, but in their submission to the Australia Council for 1978 they pointed out that they would need more money — most obviously because of their purchase of the O'Riordan St. building. When their request was cut from $900,000 to $600,000 they approached the State Government and argued that they could be considered a State Company — if only because they are the biggest users of the Opera House (and lose on the operation $100,000 a year on their State subsidy). There was a long pause.

If anything the problem is caused by the Tote's over extending themselves without any sort of financial guarantee — other than a vagud hope for federal and state subsidy to be increased. They have expanded into three theatres, which may or may not appear a good thing, according to what you think of the shows they have done in them. In any case they have increased the number of bums in seats from just under 100,000 at the Parade in 1976 to around 200,000 in 1977.

Then there came the ultimatum from the Australia Council. Presumably the Council saw the Tote’s crisis as an opportunity to push through certain changes which they had been wanting for some time. With some speculation as to the Council’s motives, these are the three points of the ultimatum.

Old Tote Rehearsal Room, Alexandria Building.

The Tote’s recent offering at the Parade Theatre, The Cat and the Canary.

1. “ D é m o c ra tis a tio n ” The Council has apparently been concerned for years that the public should have some say in the running of publicly subsidised companies. It appears that the Tote has for some reason been allowed to apply for exemption. If implemented this proposal would presumably mean that subscribers at least could become members of the company. They would not have a Board of Directors to elect, however, because that is about to disappear under point 2. Are they, then, to elect...

2. An O ffic ia l M an ag er. This is another thing which the Australia Council seems to want for publicly subsidised artistic bodies, and

The future of the Drama Theatre?

so the Tote may be a test case. The trouble is that under the Companies Act the official manager is supposed to be appointed by the creditors to trade it out of difficulties. Apart from the worrying implications this notion of a theatre as a trading company has, it conjures up the idea of an official manager who is going to produce a series of smash hit box-office successes to put the company in the black. We all wish him well. There is a rumour which has come to our ears at Theatre-Australia which, if true, suggests how he is expected to do this. It is that when the Board of Directors asked Brian Sweeney what an official manager could do that they couldn’t do, he replied, an official manager would have the $600,000.

3. A single a rtis tic d ire c to r. This is something the Tote has had before, and would doubtless still like to have. At the moment Peter Collingwood and Ted Craig are theoretically in artistic control of things. There is the by now boring issue of whether or not Robert Quentin is a sort of Machiavellian artistic eminence grise behind the Tote. There is no doubt that he is in a position to exercise some personal influence (for example, on the proposed list of plays for 1978).

He must have some authority, if only because of his position and reputation, and all that he has done for the Tote over the years. This is in fact acknowledged by his being called “Artistic Advisor” in addition to being on the Board.

At this point the State Government spoke up.

A letter from Neville Wran, presumably written

by Evan Williams, was received by the Chairman of the Board, Dale Turnbull. It said nothing about démocratisation, something of the artistic direction, and its only mention of the official manager was a reference to “radical changes” which would have to be made if the Tote was to get more money. It was in fact gloriously ambiguous, and can be used later to prove that the State Government had any attitude which it then feels it ought to have had.

It has been suggested that this letter cruelled the pitch for the Australia Council — that the Board would have been prepared to compromise (in spite of the recalcitrance of some of the more angry members) but that they now felt justified in holding out. This is probably over dramatising the situation, but certainly holding out was what everyone seemed to be doing as this was written.

There are many possible courses of action — all accounted by the Hungerford people in their report — which range from staying in all three theatres and getting all the money to retreating into the Parade and selling the Alexandria building. It is probable that the Board would be prepared to consider any of these as long as they knew exactly what money they would get for them. It is also probable that the Tote will stay in the Parade, because it costs them next to nothing (the University of New South Wales even cleans it for them) and in the Opera House, because no one else would move into it. That leaves the Seymour Centre to be abandoned — the theatre which most people (including, one gathers, the subscribers) felt would be the most exciting. Typical.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

9

ILLUSION CO M IQ UE REX C RA M PH O RN interviewed by Roger Pulvers I wanted to find out how he felt about the season of plays excised before his eyes by the governors of the Old Tote. Rex Cramphorn is a modest man, with no taste for revenge. There is not the biting anecdote or the catty personal aside. He tells the story exactly as it must have happened, and we try to understand what it all represents for Australian theatre.

‘The main point was to put on a season of plays without any sense of “the alternative": Bond. Shepard, and three Australian plays by Patrick White, Dorothy Hewett, and Louis Nowra. Just look like anywhere else in the world.

‘It started when Jim Sharman and 1 were asked by the Old Tote to submit a proposal for

using the Seymour Centre. It had been booked by them before. We suggested a season that involved using all the theatres of the Centre, with music, dance, drama, and film, perhaps a modern German season, Herzog, Fassbinder, you know ...

‘The Tote rejected this proposal as too large.

They just wanted a season of plays. So we

N ational Theatre Awards

The National Professional Theatre Awards are now in their second year. The 1977 Awards will again be presented at the Theatre Forum section of the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference in Canberra in May. Choice of winners rests solely on the votes of members of the theatre industry who are recognised by Equity. Actors, directors, designers, writers and stage crew are therefore asked to vote on the nominations listed, which are the result of a national poll of critics. There is an extra space for those who wish to vote for someone other than those nominated.

Votes received after 1st May, 1978 cannot be considered. If you are eligible to vote fill in the form (or make out a list) and post to:1977 National Theatre Awards Theatre Australia 80 Elizabeth Street Mayfield, N.S.W. 2304 All votes will be scrutinised in confidence by Equity, and the Designers Section by the Designers Association, who officially endorse the Awards.

10 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

thought out a season of five plays by the playwrights I mentioned. We went ahead, contracted actors, a n d ... but we were never sure what was happening from the Old Tote’s standpoint! I mean, they were too non­ committal on things, as if it was all a secret or something. At the point of anger, we even found ourselves questioning whether they would really go ahead with it. But eventually they just told us they had a cash flow problem or whatever they call money there, and we thought we were just being a little overly worried or something. Then there were the rumours from lots of Sydney people that the Tote was going broke.

‘It was a few days before Christmas that (Robert) Quentin called us in to tell us of the Tote's disastrous plight. I remember he used those words, “disastrous plight". He said there were three alternatives: One, go into liquidation on 31 December.

Two, go into liquidation after The Cat and the Canary had closed, which would be about February.

Rex Cramphorn.

Photo: Willy Young.

And three, do an “austerity season”, that is, do the plays exactly as announced but do them in front of a black curtain or something ridiculous like that! Quentin even recalled to us an “austerity version” of Fidelio that was done years ago in Sydney and said it was the best ever!

‘Jim and 1 went away wondering how we could save money on our productions. Then, a week later, another meeting was called. It was the Friday of the Christmas party and lots of actors thought it would be the Tote’s last fling.

We were then told that the three separate seasons (Opera House, Parade, and Seymour Centre) would begin on schedule, and then they could re-evaluate things if they went wrong and mix around the plays and venues, but still do all the plays, I mean, just do them in different places.

The next meeting was the week after Christmas. Jim, Quentin, (Ken) Southgate, and me. Quentin said that the “best thing” was to cut the Seymour Centre season altogether. Then they would try to fit in Dorothy’s and Louis's plays somewhere else. We wanted to do these

plays more than anything because they had been written for us.

‘After that the PR machine set in motion, editorials in The Herald, a thing in The Australian, that “the Old Tote had encountered difficulty” but the Seymour Centre season “had been re scheduled”. And we knew there was virtually nothing left of the season at all!

‘We thought of letters to the editor, etc. But we finally just resigned. The Tote rang Louis and Dorothy to ask for somebody else to direct their plays, but both said their contracts gave them right of approval and nixed any other directors. Patrick (White) spontaneously joined in that.

‘The upshot is that we still feel we want to do those three Australian plays, so we went back to the original idea of encompassing all theatres at the Seymour and made a proposal to the NSW Government to do this in FebruaryMarch ’79. The proposal has been completely costed and we are really hoping it will come into Continued on Page 49

VOTING FORM

N am e

A ddress

Professional S tatus (actor, w riter, directo r etc.)

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

11

The Proof of the Pudding

N ID A The National Institute of Dramatic Art Assembled by Richard Mills A Drama School’s contribution to the theatrical community is a twosided coin. Positively, it rests with the number of well trained, talented graduates the school can release into the theatre world — and how easily and permanently they can find employment.

Negatively, it is more difficult to estimate — the amount of ‘talent’ or spontaneity that it formalises to extinction, disillusions or rejects.

Any form of show-business requires that the artist form a performing identity, and develop that individuality.

Any school, while encouraging a student to round out and extend his potential abilities, must also encourage the development of an individual identity. The extent to which it refuses to recognise this, letting the graduate system requirements become formalised to the extent of churning out a factory product, is the extent of its negative contribution.

Many graduates of the National Institute of Dramatic Art have gone on to successful acting careers, notably Robyn Nevin, Kate Fitzpatrick,

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Judy Morris, Helen Morse, John Gregg, now in The Glittering Prizes, is employed with the National Theatre Company in London. Gary (Norman Gunston) MacDonald, contrary to belief in some quarters, is a NIDA graduate — earned, not honorary; Murray Foy of the Queensland Theatre Company, Rick Billinghurst of La Boite are NIDA graduates.

More significant is that a recent survey of graduate employment conducted by the school revealed that eighty five per cent of the total graduate force are currently employed in the theatre or related areas. No estimate was made of those who had retired through illness or marriage. Neither RADA nor the American schools can show such figures, although that may not be a very fair comparison given the cir­ cumstances.

Of the three people that 1 have spoken with who were ‘not asked to continue their studies’ at NIDA after the first year, none regrets either their attendance, or that they were not able to

continue. All are currently pursuing successful careers in theatre or film, and feel that NIDA was not for them. One, who went young, feels that she might perhaps benefit now from some advanced work. All are very glad of that one year.

NIDA began in 1959, with Robert Quentin as its first director. Grounds and free serviced premises were made available on the campus of the University of New South Wales largely through the efforts of the then Vice Chancellor, Sir Philip Baxter. Funding was by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, passing to the Australian Council for the Arts and in 1978 to the Commonwealth Education Department. The Trust still provides much assistance in the way of costumes and props, though not money.

From the beginning, the approach was nonacademic. The concept was to be that of involving students in professional theatre, of teaching the crafts and techniques of theatre while providing an atmosphere conducive to individual artistic development. The object was

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to turn out working theatre people, schooled in the basic skills of either acting or technical production; to expose them to professional theatre; to open doors to employment in the form of contracts; and to encourage students to extend their artistic awareness.

The school, under current director John Clark, still professes to that attitude. There are four full time diploma courses offered at NIDA. Three-year courses are acting, technical production, and design. A one-year course in direction is limited to two more experienced students per year, and gives a basic concept in all three other areas combined with opportunities for direction both in the school, and attached to outside companies.

Applications for all courses close in October, and entry to the school is by arranged audition and interview, held throughout Australia over November-December each year. Competition is fierce, with about fifty new entrants each year being selected from nearly a thousand applicants. There is also an advanced course, run in conjunction with the Jane Street Theatre — a NIDA offshoot — and a recent course in theatre administration held in early February 1977 proved so overwhelmingly successful that it is likely to be repeated.

The courses are arduous, physically and mentally. Students work all day, from 9 to after 5, and if in production, at night and weekends.

In the first year, the acting students have hourlong classes in voice, movement, language, history of theatre, masks, improvisation, and

theatre techniques.

Technical production and design students work together for the first year, studying props, sound, design, history of theatre, music, and lighting, as well as life drawing classes and production meetings.

Actors in the second year move on to fencing, makeup, dialect and acting while continuing movement and history of theatre.

Technical production course includes business studies and history of theatre. Design specialises more in actual stage and costume design.

In the third year, for the actors the course includes singing and dancing lessons, and technical students are being encouraged to follow their own special areas, while maintaining studies over the whole spectrum of production and design.

All classes are in the morning, as the entire school is involved in various productions from two in the afternoon. Much of the tuition is by outside instructors, either on a part-time basis while attached to professional companies, or as visitors.

The ABC provides assistance in the form of technical help and tuition in television tech­ niques. Visitors cover film work, specialist fields, and added administration and production tuition. Richard Wherrett, currently producing Once in a Lifetime with the third-year students, is a regular visitor.

I gathered some comments at random — students are sensibly required not to give press interviews — while waiting to watch rehearsals.

“The first year is really the depersonalising one. You’re all lumped in together. Second year is the heavy year — you start to get right into the techniques, to feel yourself beginning to use them. That is the main year.”

“It’s going to be good to get out. Like, its not exactly fake but — it's a controlled environment.

You come out into the real world.”

“If you are doing something wrong, you can go and ask a tutor and he will spend as much time as it takes with you. But if you don’t, it comes out in front of everyone at the critical sessions. You can lose a lot of confidence.”

“The atmosphere is incredible. It is a creative atmosphere where everyone is working to build something together. It is one of the most exciting things I have been involved with. The level of commitment is amazing.” (Visiting director.)

“The secret of NIDA is that it is painstakingly craft-oriented, specifically non-academic. I don’t yet know which direction (in production outside NIDA) I will take. But I do know that all the doors are open to me.”

The atmosphere is something that im­ mediately impressed me, too. In all the classes I attended, where I was sometimes introduced, sometimes not, I made little impression. From first years up, the students were there to do a job, and my presence made no difference. An occasional eye flicked in my direction as I scribbled furiously, but the lesson was un­ affected, the students completely involved.

Classes I visited included a third year move-

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I3

NIDA design student at work. ment class under Keith Bain. The accent was on bodily awareness, students being required to gain a feeling for the expression and attitude of their bodies by moving with closed eyes, gauging distances, and feeling emotionally rather than consciously manipulating the movements.

Aubrey Mellor was working on vocal techniques with second year acting students.

Starting slow and soft and building up speed and volume, they would then discuss the emotions occasioned by the delivery style, while correcting faults in delivery and finding individual limits. The lesson seemed to aim at both polishing vocal technique and providing another avenue for role understanding. It was interesting to note that as each finished a reading, often leaving some high emotion floating around, Mellor brought the discussion down to a very low key in pace and volume.

When the next student got up, he faced a neutral, relaxed atmosphere.

Betty Williams explained with a grin that her first year voice class of twelve had had a first night the previous evening, with the usual after­ play party. She began to wake them up with business-like physical exercises. Jogging and counting, letting the sound come out of its own accord. Spinal undulations and flexing to free the rib cage — “I don’t want any energy to that sound. Now develop it — just be surprised that your breath has gone.” I had to leave to catch Wherrett’s rehearsals.

Kevin Palmer runs the technical course, George Whaley the acting. Kevin showed me round the technical premises — woeful in their size. It was surprising to see the standard of work that was being done, especially with flats usually being painted outside through lack of space. All productions are handled completely by students, with staff either advising and directing or just advising a student director.

They appear usually in the NIDA Theatre — the old tin shed where the Old Tote was born as an offshoot of NIDA in 1963.

“In a first year (technical) student”, Kevin Palmer says, ”we are looking simply for good 14 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

potential as either a stage manager or designer.

It’s indefinable. You go on as much as you can tell from an interview where there are no paper qualifications. We give applicants a choice of one of three plays, and they are asked before they come to build a set model as they would stage the play. At least that tells us whether they understand the scale enough to do a model, and we discuss in depth how he would design the play, maybe light it. If he has a speciality we discuss it. At least we can find out what he doesn’t know.”

He goes on to explain the courses, and that in the final year students are attached to outside companies for much of the time. I later saw two letters to Kevin from the Williamson organisation, reporting on students Moss Cooper, Garry Snowden, and Murray Taylor who had been assisting in the production of A Chorus Line. I quote the last paragraph from Sue Nattrass, production director.

“May 1 add that all three students who worked on A Chorus Line were a credit to NIDA, both in their work and in their attitudes, and we greatly value their participation in the production.”

This third year outside attachment, says Kevin, besides giving professional experience, is a golden opportunity for students to make contacts and investigate the employment field before they are thrown on the workforce.

“In exceptional circumstances the NIDA Board of Studies will allow students to take paid positions with some professional company, and complete their year in full employment with them. But of course, we only do this because the companies ask — we flex, at the Board’s discretion, and the individual student’s development, according to job opportunity,

rather than drop a full class of graduates on the workforce at a given time. I would be surprised, though, if all this year’s class weren’t working by early next year.”

I put a few of the obvious possible criticisms of such a school to John Clark.

“I think basically that a theatre school is as good as its graduates. On the other hand. I’ve known a number of people who came here and not responded to the course — especially in the earlier years, when we were less selective and used the first year to sort them out — and then go out and work successfully in the profession. I think that’s terrific.

“But the thing that amazes me is how many (of those who did not graduate) that are now working successfully will at interviews describe themselves as NIDA graduates.

“A lot of kids come here with talent, but too young — they are straight out of school, and have no developed work attitudes. Sometimes the shock of not being invited back for a second year will stimulate them to the attitude they need.

“My approach to student problems — pro­ fessional or personal, which often affect work — is that as long as I know about it 1 can do something to help. 1 encourage them to come to staff with any worries.

“Invariably when you come to somewhere like NIDA you go through a period of loss of confidence. It’s like a really good tennis amateur who decides to take lessons from a pro. The pro suggests that he change his grip — and for a while his game is shot to hell. But the important thing is that in the long run, he will get further faster with the new technique than he would have with the old.”

NIDA’s A Midsummer N ight’s Dream. 1976 Final year students.

But W hat About The Ingredients?

N ID A from an applicants-eye view by Bea Star (Stage name of course dahling!)

Once the prospect of auditioning before the professionals was an awesome thought. Now it’s just a sick joke.

I arrived on the appointed day and sat down with another thirty-six starry eyed applicants, who ranged from a bewildered girl in pigtails, to a trendy whose head was a living memorial to Elvis, to the collection of lovely lads seated a little distantly, with their equally debonair suitors in tow.

First off we were herded into a class-room to do ‘warm up’ exercises with a NIDA student who seemed to think that wearing a track suit on a sweltering day proved him to be the epitome of fitness. The exercises included, of course, the positively vile clap-clap-this-is-my-name game (with the optional addition of this-is-my-suburb for those who cared to reveal it) and other well worn routines used to subdue and embarrass, and bolster the authority of the person in charge.

The facade of fairness was shattered early with “anonymous questionaires” that required you to fill in the number assigned to you along with such essential information as marital status, parents marital status, religion schooling (never admit to private education!), and how often parents visit the theatre. When I enquired about the anonymity problem I was told 1 was the only person who had noticed. I still had to fill in my number in spite of my exceptional perspicacity. A short address by the surrogate head-man preceded our actual auditions, in which we were informed of NIDA entrance policy; thirteen men and nine women would be chosen from the hundreds of hopefuls. No explanation was given as to why there was this carefully structured sexual discrimination — whether the powers that be considered that this was all the business could take, or that they couldn’t find end of year plays with a high enough complement of female parts — but when asked what if there were ten good actresses, he told us that ten couild be squeezed in at a push, but certainly no more. Why not just choose the twenty two best applicants; surely merit is a more equitable, not to mention satisfactory, criterion than sex?

All auditionees had two prepared pieces to do and we were split into two groups. The panel assessing my group was a duo to put Norm and Edna Everage to shame. She sat, all seventeen stone of her, kaftan, batwing glasses covering thick layers of makeup reducing him to a wriggling eel beside her. I performed my piece at

the end of which I was sternly asked if I had played the part before. No, of course not, but they looked disbelieving. When everyone had finished, the same pieces all had to be repeated, but this time with auditionees standing in for other characters where required. If the lovely laddies were supposed to be addressing women, they chose their gentlemen friends; when a girl chose me to play a male she was smartly told to choose a man. Of course, I thought, if men can play female parts they don’t need so many women undergraduates. Another large lady, not quite on the high frequency NIDA wavelength (who, having picked her Moliere piece from an audition book, wasn't sure who wrote it — “Milly someone 1 think”) nonetheless delivered her speech with panache, but on seeing Dame Edna take not a note — a sure sign of disapprobation — flashed a large bosom by a quick flick of the wrap-around dress in dissatisfied response.

Lunch was a cosy affair, with the acne ridden, track-suited second year student attempting more than friendly overtures with me. There was a general air of reluctance as we traipsed back for round two; individual interview and second audition piece.

Interview: “Meeting of persons face to face... oral examination of candidate” (O.E.C.). On entering the interview room my proffered “hello” went ignored until I asked if I might sit down. Again a man and a woman, but this time

the lady was pencil thin, fifties, but in a dress tied at the sides all the way down and nothing beneath it. The interviewer seemed more interested in my relationships with staff at a previous institution than where my interests lay.

My private school education was jibed at, and the production of a gin bottle as a prop elicited the remark “I suppose you pinched that from Daddy’s liquor cabinet this morning”.

On finding out that I couldn't sing I was told to sing a song — a sleazy night club song, making up the while to, yes, the pimpled track suit. An improvisation scene with same — shop­ lifting, because that would be foreign to a private schoolie — was virtually impossible as my partner’s responses were so stupid. The male interviewer actually laughed when I said as much in the context of the scene.

In fact he seemed decidedly enthusiastic by the end. and said that a telephone call would be forthcoming shortly. But the disapproval of Edna, Madge and the eel must have over ridden him for I later received a negative letter. By then it was a relief. I couldn’t help but reflect on first hand knowledge I had of two unsuccessful applicants (both private school), one nowworking for the South Australian Film Corporation, and the other having since graduated from RADA. If anyone should be applying to NIDA for next year’s intake, a few tips. Try not to be a woman. If you are, slim for all you’re worth and grow your hair down to your bum; turn up in the most cut-away leotard you can find and authentic looking rehearsal socks; cultivate a pretentious but not educated voice, look bored, but don’t forget to call everyone darling. Men, turn camp and bring along your boyfriend to do what spade work he can in the corridor while you’re performing.

Sour grapes this may be, but audition preparations were strenuous and nerve wracking, and though admission when there are so many candidates is not expected, a degree of mannerliness and consideration is. If enduring direct attacks of sexism and conscious humiliation are part of being an actor, NIDA may feel it suitable to include these in the course, but if because it is the major recognised training establishment in the country and hence has great competition for places, it feels it can afford to select from a kind of socio politico sexual in-group, I fear its reputation and standards will suffer.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

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16 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Theatre/WA

P E R T H F E S T IV A L

Should a theatre feel apologetic about being entertaining.

MARGOT LUKE The Norman Conquests by Alan A yckbourn.

National Theatre Company at the Playhouse, Perth, W.A. Opened 3 February, 1978. Director, Stephan B arry; Designer, Sue Russell; Lighting Designer, Tony Youlden; Stage Manager, C h ristin e R andall.

Norman, Paul Mason; Tom, Robert F ag g e tter; Sarah, Rosem ary B arr; Reg, Edgar M etc alfe; Ruth, Judy Nunn; Annie, Leith T aylo r.

Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Con­ quests launches a new season at the Perth Playhouse, also its new director, Stephen Barry, and the drama segment of the 1978 Festival of Perth. Opinions were divided on the suitability of the vehicle to carry its burden. Did the fact that it is funny make it too trivial? Did the fact that it was a play-cycle, i.e. massive, redeem it? Should a theatre feel apologetic about being entertaining at a time when it ought to be Making a Cultural Mark?

The play is vintage Ayckbourn, circa 1974, funny without the blackness or even bleakness that made critics give his later plays more serious consideration. It also takes the jigsaw element of the previous plays to the limit: not two simultaneous dinner parties, nor two co-existing flats, nor three consecutive kitchens, but rather a complex pattern of sim ultaneously developing actions in three different areas, split up into three different plays. The tensions of one play turn into the seductions in another; the quarrels of one are resolved elsewhere. The sheer sleightof-hand virtuosity would be worthy of attention even if Ayckbourn didn’t manage to make so many witty and nicely focussed observations about manners, attitudes and stereotypes encountered “living in the seventies”.

The title is funny when you’re in the know, but alas, some potential audiences (especially those not in the habit of keeping up with theatre news) are put off by the fear that this will turn out to be something dauntingly medieval. In fact, of

course, the Norman who makes the Conquests is a very seventies character— totally amoral—lies to all his women but makes them happy. He’s played by Paul Mason in an assortment of dreadful clothes, and a sense of humour that ranges from the manic to the gently wistful. (Why does he specialise in playing stuffed shirts on television, one wonders?)

The women who are conned (if that’s the right verb to go with conquest) are Judy Nunn, hilarious as Norman’s excessively short-sighted and spiky wife, who proves rather touchingly vulnerable to his charms all over again; his unmarried sister-in-law (Leith Taylor) who is a marvellously complex creature of awkward charm, romantic longings and an exasperated sense of reality; and his other sister-in-law, a bossy, totally unreasonable creature, who henpecks her husband unrelentingly, but despite her intense disapproval of Norman (or because of it?) falls victim to his charms. Rosemary Barr shows a flair for elegance, and her movements suggest lovely nuances of upper-suburban pre­ tension. One cannot help comparing her style to that of Penelope Keith who played the role in London, but the similarity does not discredit her performance.

All three of the women become more likeable in the second play, and although Judy Nunn was at ease from the start, there was a striking improvement in the more subtle playing of both Leith Taylor (who toned down her gestures) and Rosemary Barr (who became funnier and although still formidably awful, rather less strident.)

As the long-suffering Reg (henpecked husband) Edgar Metcalfe created a perky little man, much given to the odd barking laugh at his own jokes, and fanatically earnest about board games. There is a marvellous sequency in Living Together, where he not only explains some elabor­ ately impossible rules of a game he invented himself, but gives a frenzied impersonation of chess-pieces in action to prove a point.

Bob Faggetter plays the slow-witted vet, (he has difficulty even persuading cats to come out of trees) and half-hearted suitor to the unmarried sister, with an engaging affability that rescues the character from the borders of idiocy. Boyish and ele­ phantine he so clearly means well that one half hopes he’ll finally take the plunge and declare himself, even if one does wish the girl could land herself a more promising lover.

The production is leisurely without being slow. Time is taken to establish

character, bits of business are relished, inanimate objects take on a personality of their own (like the rug, scene of memor­ able seductions, or the too-small chair invariably destined for the largest and slowest guest.) Even the demanding and presumably querulous invalid mother upstairs, establishes an invisible presence.

Sue Russell’s sets are practical and just attractive enough not to be boring even when the setting is supposed to be brownish and vaguely oppressive to suggest a family home in need of refurbishing and a new life.

It’s a good lively start to the season, and it might even lure those nebulous “middle of the road” audiences back to the theatre.

From the disappointing to the mainly sublime COLLIN O’BRIEN Othello by William Shakespeare. Chichester Festival Theatre Company at the Concert Hall, Perth, W.A. Opened 4 February, 1978. Director, P eter Dew s; Designer, F in lay Jam es.

Othello, K eith M ich ell; Iago, Roy D otrlce; Desdemona, N yree D aw n P o rter; Roderigo, Tony Robinson; Emilia, June Jago; Cassio, R ichard Cornish; Brabantio, Nigel Stock; Lodovico, Paul M ax w e ll; Duke of Venice, Rex Robinson; Grationo, P eter Sugden; Bianca, Je a n n e tte S te rk e ; Montano, P h ilip A nthony; Cypriot, Colum Q allivan ; Officer, Alan Hayw ood; Mes­ senger, B arry Quin; Soldiers, C live Johnstone, John P a tric k ; Servants etc., M ichael Boothe, John N ew to n , Elliot Cooper, Roberta Symes, Jessica Turner.

The Rape o f Lucretia by Benjamin Britten.

W.A. Opera Company with Festival of Perth at the Octagon Theatre, Perth, W.A. Opened 8 February, 1978. Musical Director and Principal Conductor, Alan Abbott; Producer, Brian Crossley; Designer, G raham M aclean; Stage Manager, Ken C am p bell-D o b bie.

Male Chorus, G erald S tern; Female Chorus, THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

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Daphne H arris; Collartinus, C liff A rndt; Junius, Ian W estrip ; Tarquinius, Lyndon T e rra c in i; Lucretia, Lesley S ten d er; Bianca, Anne W atson; Lucia, Louetta F a rra r.

There exists an apocryphal story about Shakespeare and his leading actor Richard Burbage. It seems that they were getting sloshed together one day in the Mermaid tavern. More than half full of Bacchic bravado, Burbage prodded a hamfisted forefinger into the pigeonchest of the upstart crow from Stratford and declared in that resounding, vibrant baritone which had so often disturbed the rats in the thatch of the Globe: ‘Willie, laddie, anything you can write, I can act!’. Those abstracted, Droeshout eyes narrowed for an instant, but Shakespeare said nothing.

Next day, however, he began work on Othello.

The play can prove intractable to the limehungry namepart actor, and the reasons are structural. It is Iago who leads us by the hand through the action, who takes us into his confidence in the more intimate, closeup, nudge-nudge solilo­ quies. Othello is more aloof and stoutpedestalled, with a fine but distinctly distancing line in som ewhat windy rhetoric.

I’ve always thought of Othello as the sort of chap who would be a disaster at a dinner party. While the soup got cold he would be regaling the company with outrageous whoppers about his ex­ periences among the Anthropophagae, incidentally a tribe unhead of before or since (perhaps they knew when they were licked). Before the fish course was done he would be namedropping exotic oceanic scenarios such as ‘the Pontic sea whose icy current and compulsive course ne’er feels retiring ebb but keeps due on to the Propontic and the H ellespon t’, or sounding off about his prowess in dealing with the more recalcitrant citizens of Aleppo, doubtless demonstrating his skill by leaning across the mahogony and lifting a fellow diner bodily from his chair by the lapels to show how he ‘took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him— THUS!’. All in all, decidedly heavy weather among the crisp, show-white napery and Waterford crystal.

Iago is a fine deflator of such pomposity and pretension. When he tells Roderigo that Desdemona loves Othello ‘but for bragging and telling fantastical lies’, we in the stalls tend to go along with him. He also has a line in unmitigated bastardry which appeals to the fallen Adam in us all.

There is no point in the moralists telling us we should loathe such a creature: all the world loves an arch bastard, just so long as we are not the ones on the wrong end of his escapades.

Another aspect of the play which makes it difficult to present credibly is that the action depends on Othello believing a palpable lie. The problem is to make him do so without appearing stupid or forgoing our belief in his heroic stature. Unfortun­ ately the play as it stands is not as much help as some. Unlike The W inter’s Tale for example it will not work reasonably 18 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

well if you just play it straight and let the dramatic structure take care of things for you.

All of which means that a production cannot afford to be cautious and middleof-the road but must be inventive and adventurous if it is to make us sit up, which is precisely where the Chichester production fell down. It was in the main professionally and sincerely performed but rarely provided those insights which we rightly ask of a good production of such a well known classic. I had expected more, since the director Peter Dews had amply demonstrated in both the TV series A n A ge o f K ings and The S pread o f th e Eagle that he is an intelligent and perceptive interpreter of Shakespeare, capable of translating his insights into relevent stage action.

I would have expected the nineteenth century British Empire setting of the play to produce reverberations so often lost in fancy dress Elizabethan versions, but except for Roy Dotrice’s Iago the context did not seem to have informed the actors’ work, the setting was largely gratuitous and the performances would have worked exactly the same in Elizabethan costume.

Keith Michell gave an honest, straight­ forward interpretation of the role of Othello, although at times the gestures and vocal gracenotes seemed to bear the stamp of the actor’s personal style rather than be the result of a conception of the part. Nyree Dawn Porter’s Desdemona was affectionate and graceful, but lacked the sensuality which the part calls for (it has always seemed to me one of the supreme ironies of the play that the more passionate Desdemona is, the more will Othello be inclined to credit that she might be unfaithful). June Jago’s Emilia has been much praised for a sensitivity so often lacking in the part, but again I find myself in a double bind: I have always thought that Emilia’s earthy peasant pragmatism juxtaposed to the more sophisticated Desdemona’s simple virtue one of the strong dramatic contrasts of the play, a contrast which Miss Jago’s interpretation naturally diminished. Roderigo was played as the usual twit—here Dickensian rather than the more usual Andrew Aguecheeck abroad, but still with the high pitched voice suggesting that his underpants were too tight. And those Cypriots! Perhaps they are an irredeemable lot, what one critic describes as ‘bints who are no better than they should be and bumboat men’.

The girls were all baubles, bangles and beads with lots of Carmenesque flounce, leftovers from the chorus of some itinerant Gypsy Baron company; the men wore traditional Greek costume, but contrived to look like uncomfortable extras, un­ certain and insufficiently made up. It was as though the Concert Hall manager Nigel Prescott had been asked to fill out the company by pressing into service younger members of the cleaning and bar staffs, like Falstaff’ ‘discarded, unjust servingmen, younger songs to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers tradefallen, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace’.

Which leaves me to commend Roy Dotrice’s Iago, the only performance

which seemed conceived and continuously tuned in to the context in which the play was set. Here was the pokerbacked, longserving Sar’major, the excellent non­ commissioned officer who effectively runs the Regiment but is not, for class reasons, considered office timber, unlike the Sand­ hurst man Cassio. As this Iago confides to us his fears about his wife’s infidelity a tight, manic smile plays on his lips, which brought to my mind the thinlipped, coldeyed smile of Enoch Powell as he speaks of ‘repatriating British-born immigrants’. Behind this, Iago’s stiff upper lip a ghastly cankerworm of envy gnaws away ‘mining all within’. A brill­ iantly conceived and executed perform­ ance.

The Perth Concert Hall was a disastrous place to present this (or indeed any) play.

Since this O thello was designed for a Guthrie style openstage theatre, of which Perth has a fine example in the Octagon, the inappropriateness of venue was all the more galling. Doubtless considerations of finance—the Octagon seats only about 700—forced the choice, and I suppose we must be glad that the play was not relegated to that aeroplane-hangar white elephant the Entertainment Centre. But people could not hear halfway back in the Concert Hall, and when one adds the two-dollar rip-off for the programme (leftover from the Chichester, which told us much about The Apple Cart as well) I can imagine many a nextday sorehead.

But from the disappointing to the mainly sublime—Benjamin Britten’s The R ape o f L ucretia. With no claims to connoisseurship in twentieth century opera, I have nevertheless always been bowled over by Britten’s operas. No wonder this one was greeted with such enthusiasm on its first appearance. Britten has managed to bring intellectual weight to a genre often condemned for rank m elodram atic plottin g, self-in du lgent lyricism and encore-seeking.

Britten’s seriousness informs the very structure, using two chorus figures not only to provide a Byzantinesque link between a pagan story of virtue and the Christianity which was 500 years off, but to add w eight through recitative and commentary reminiscent of the Evangelist in a Bach Passion. The music is austere and classical in all the best connotations of these terms, with a simplicity which masks its sophistication and a sparing and therefore all the more effective use of lyricism. Alan Abbot’s conducting was taut and controlled, the singing generally excellent and only occasionally incompre­ hensible.

One does have a quibble with the design however. The stage is fussily dressed, Lucretia’s bedroom neoclassical rather than Roman, with even a hint of milady’s boudouir. The revolve was not exploited for its possibilities in changed setting, and the mechanics of staging tended to militate against the fragile fabric of such a piece.

Lucretia’s bed, for example was a narrow couch. Perhaps I am too imbued with Shakespeare’s conception, all drapery and heavy breathing, but this couch looked unlikely for a comfortable nap, let alone accommodating a rampaging Tarquin.

Theatre/Victoria When at one point he leaped onto it, the irreverant thought sprang to mind that he might be about to replace a faulty lightglobe. Nor did the furtive sneaking on and off in the halflight help. But musically Britten was well served, and I will especially carry in mind the elegant and powerful Male Chorus of Gerald Stern, beautifully and articulately sung. The Western Australian Opera Company is to be congratulated for their enterprise in presenting a highlight of the Festival.

Particularly in view of the problems___ this production must be counted a success.

CLIFF GILLAM The Wakefield Mystery Plays modern text by Max Jonas. Festival of Perth, University

Performing Groups presents 1978 New Fortune Company, New Fortune Theatre, Perth, W.A. Opened 10 February, 1978.

Director, John M llson; Designer, Am anda Hearn; Musical Director, Ban Macpharson; Stage Manager, Nall Q odfray.

With P ata r C a rro ll, Max Jonas, Jam as B eattie and E liza b e th Calocob.

Each of the last three Festivals in Perth has seen a fruitful collaboration between director John Milson and University Performing Groups. The 1977 Festival as well as the current one, has seen the participation also of Sydney actor, Peter Carroll, making a triune relationship particularly appropriate to the specifically religious drama chosen for performance, T.S. Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral and the Wakefield Mystery Plays.

I must confess to having had consider­ able doubt about the success of a Festival season of the Wakefield Mystery Plays.

The doubt was not connected with Milson’s capacity to effectively utilise the vast playing area and many levels of the New Fortune Theatre, since he had already proved this capacity with his 1976 Faery Queene, and one could in any case see the New Fortune being well suited to the episodic character of the Wakefield plays.

Nor was there any doubt that Carroll, as the featured performer, could use his considerable talents in ensuring a point of concentration and focus for the sprawling action of even a truncated version of the full Wakefield cycle. And finally, success­ ful union with student colleagues in the past by both director and leading actor seems to augur similarly successful collab­ oration.

My doubts were simply in connection with the choice of the Wakefield Mysteries as a Festival offering. Two huge problems

seemed to me connected with this choice.

Firstly the cultural context in which these products of medieval piety were to be presented, that of suburban Australia in the late ’70’s, seemed to militate against both the possibility of an adequate recreation of the spirit of the cycle, and against large-scale interest in the community generally.

On first night, therefore, I was prepared to be a little bored. I was however, surprised and delighted to discover that Prof. Max Jones’ entirely new script provided a most workable text, conveying with ease much of the spirit of broad colloquial humour leavened with reverence in which these plays must first have been presented. Director John Milson made the most of this script, and also gave full vein to his powers both of orchestration of movement and flow across the vast area and triple levels of his stage, and as a deviser of the properly theatrical effect, thereby ensuring that the pageant of episodes from creation through Lucifer’s rebellion, the fall of man, the slaughter of Abel, the flood, the Age of the Prophets, the nativity and the Herodian massacre of the Innocents, was constantly lively, never degenerating into the static declamation I had feared. Only during the latter half of the Herodian episode, the last before interval and the longest by a good deal, did I feel that the pace, energy and vigour of the production had begun to flag.

The second half, made up basically of the key episodes in the life and passion of Christ, with a Doomsday sequence at the end to complete the long cycle of the sacred history, I felt to be less interesting and dynamic as theatre, more frequently succumbing to the demands of pageant than of drama. This was despite what one thinks of as an inherently more dramatic action (in the New Testament material) and a very fine performance as Christ by Peter Carroll (in startling contrast to his Noah earlier on, a little masterpiece of broad comic acting).

The standard of acting by a largely student cast supported by such seasoned performers as James Beattie (God), Max Jones (Herod), Elizabeth Caiacob (Uxor and Mary Magdalene) and of course Peter Carroll, was uniformly good. It seems a little unfair to single out such as Karl Zwicky as Lucifer and Desmond Lukey as Cain from a cast in which so many student performers did so well in such a variety of roles. Design for the production, a vast undertaking, was by student designer Amanda Hearn and was generally ex­ tremely effective in terms of both costume and set.

On the whole, and particularly in view of the problems outlined earlier, this pro­ duction of the Wakefield Mystery Plays must be counted a success. I will be interested to know at the end of the season whether, despite a good text, judicious (on the whole) editing of the Cycle, inventive and sympathetic direction and a generally high level of performance, the faintly antiquarian and overtly religious aura which surrounds the very title of the production, does not dissuade the happily h ed onistic heathens of Perth from attending.

The heart might be in the right place but the dramaturgical evidence isn’t.

JACK HIBBERD R ock’ola by T im Gooding. Hoopla! Theatre Foundation at the Playbox, Melbourne, Vic. Opened 15 February, 1978. Director, Adam S alzo r; Designer, P ete r C o rrig an ; Audio Animator, Red Sym ons; Lighting Design, John B eckett; Stage Manager, S andra M atlo ck.

Jet de Luxe, Max Phipps; Velvet, Jenn ie C ullen; Angel Sugar, Nano N agle; Pagliacci, G raem e B lundell.

This article represents a change in my general policy of not reviewing the works of Australian contemporaries. I’ve done this because of a suspicion about the atmosphere: a critical notice might be seen as sour grapes, a favourable one as a buttering-up. All that can be said, as I now step into the fray, is that I am dead keen to see a wealth and diversity of fine new Australian plays, and that this the perspective from which I write, whether in anger or glee.

Tim Gooding’s R ock’ola is Hoopla’s inaugural main theatre production. The previous show, The Elocution o f Benjamin Franklin, was entrepreneured from Sydney and has since thankfully been exported to where it belongs, the West End, the home of camp elocutionary theatre.

That Rock ’ola was first workshopped at the 1977 Australian National Playwrights’ Conference and most favourably received is an unhappy reflection on the critical climate of that convocation. All kinds of excesses and infelicities should have been ironed out before it landed on the doorsteps of Nimrod and Hoopla. The Conference has not done a service to Tim Gooding.

The play sings out for a thorough rehabilitation, the kind of procedure, for example, that actors, director and writer working critically, constructively, and collaboratively in a theatre for some weeks can provide. A tough yet amicable detachment is required, particularly on the part of the director. A director who can pen the following sentiments in a pro­ gramme note would not seem on the face of it to possess these attributes: “The games we play are not good or THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

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Angel (Nano Nagle) and Pagliacci (Graeme Blundell) In Hoopla’s R ock’ola bad—they are merely the ‘protective skins’ of ‘set behaviour patterns’ that will allow us to come closer to our neighbours without burning ourselves or them....

R ock’ola is about the ‘skins’ of the ‘war and post war baby’ generation....I cried (almost) when I saw the real results of an unloved generation....Thanks Tim for seeing it, and the cast for expressing it.”

The major failures of communication in Rock’ola belong to the author and not the theme. The play quite simply lacks a strong dramatic centre and its own lucid logic; it is too loose, too clotted and static.

The heart might be in the right place but the dramaturgical evidence isn’t. Within the world of the play, we really wish to know why, or how, the four disaffected rock-freaks decide or are compelled to engage in a suicide flight. That the play is unnaturalistic is not enough; it is merely short on the appropriate pain, despair, and futility.

Allusions to World War II, tail-gunners, Hiroshima, the children of the bomb, are not sufficient unless they are dramatically integrated and plausibly generative. Simi­ larly with allusions to the more morbid (and romantic) side of rock mythology, its purported revolutionary nature, its alleged later sell-out to commercialism etc. Unless they are convincingly cobbled into the action-matrix of the play, they seem rather token.

There is no such thing as ‘healing music’ (early rock’n’roll). The healing has to be found within ourselves. To believe in ‘healing music’ is to believe in a surrogate and vicarious world, an escapism at the opposite pole to revolution, alternative societies, anarchy, existentialism etc., and one that in the end is a potential prey to fascism or the sick militarism and hari-kiri cults of a Mishima.

The play indulges itself; it doesn’t seem aware of a more sardonic and positive view on all this, as is the master of this genre, Sam Shepard. Music is ultimately the finest ointment (to improvize on the 20 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

director’s skin metaphor) imaginable for the soul, the self etc., but will not bear a quasi-religious, metaphysical or political burden in itself, regardless of all the legends.

Stripped of the camouflage concerning rock’n’roll, circus, shows, surf beaches, war etc. R ock’ola gropes towards dealing with four characters (respectively rootless, over-hardened, comically inept and naive), whose aspirations have failed. If the play had concentrated more on fleshing and detailing the characters and their re­ lations, then a lot of things it is attempting to say might have emerged organically and not have had the sense of being imposed.

The other direction would have been simply to create a spunky rock musical. In this production, there seems to be a basic indecision about these possibilities.

Rock ’ola kicks off with an extended hip monologue that unfortunately reminded me of Heathcote Williams’s much-adored gibberish in A c/D c. Max Phipps manfully, heroically, strutted through it all to arrive at a song: “Just Because”. Ironically, that song said in a few moments as much as all the preceeding effusions.

The best patches in the whole evening are those in which characters sing songs (composer, Red Symons), contend with each other dramatically, or peel off some facts about their existence.

Under the circumstances, Nano Nagle, Graeme Blundell, Max Phipps (who has by far the most indigestible role) and Jennie Cullen all acquit themselves with grit and spark. Nano Nagle cleverly takes her character on a journey (one dimension to two). Graeme Blundell, too adroit at times will all the tricks of the trade, brings off a couple of most affecting songs. Too often, however, the actors are not given enough to get their teeth into. A good image appears (like the man swimming in the ocean with a trombone strapped to his back) and it is cruelly flogged to ex­ tinction. As in the best of Sam Shepard, the play should swarm with such images,

left alone to exhilarate and astound the imaginations of the audience. Actors creatively need, thrive upon, this kind of electricity emanating from the crowd. A top example of this was provided by Nano Nagle when she sang her song in the last act with Brechtian aplomb—hard, earthy, ungiving, yet right from the ovaries.

The Playbox stage is an awkward one—high and raked to above the heads of the stalls audience. Peter Corrigan, whose design life has been dedicated to enabling, inspiring, the actor to get on with the job, seems to have been defeated here or lowered his standards for once. The electric chairs, though pragmatically de­ ployed, don’t add a lot to the sense of the play, unless privately, symbolically he wished to electrocute the play and its characters a la Sing-Sing.

Hoopla have made an injudicious choice with this play, especially as an opener (though mercifully they haven’t gone for a safe piece of naturalism). Once having made the choice, however, I think they should’ve stepped in and either pepped it up (more songs, routines, choreography, zap etc.) or firmly and sympathetically kneaded it into a more substantial and coherent shape. All this said, it is really the job, the craft, the art, or the writer to develop his own critical faculties, to cultivate in himself the ability to stand back from his beloved work and loathe it, to put it through the most severe skeptical test, to imagine the worst, and then maybe the best will imaginitively survive.

The summer of our content.

JOHN LARKIN Cop Out Melbourne Theatre Co., Russell Street, Theatre.

Ring Around the Moon MTC, Athenaeum Theatre.

A Chorus Line J.C. Williamsons. Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Side By Side By Sondheim, Comedy Theatre.

A Mad World M y Masters Australian Per­ forming Group. Pram Factory.

Cop Out! interrupted what had been a most successful season by the Melbourne Theatre Company at Russell Street. A new Australian play by Cliff Green, it probably suffered to some extent by coming after David Williamson’s The Club, which is a hard act to follow, but considered alone, it has to be seen as a good idea gone astray.

The story is about a commercial TV station and its police drama series, a subject near, if not dear, to Mr. Green, as he used to write scripts for Homicide and Matlock Police. The events are the machinations of the sausage machine factory and its desperate people as they fantasise on giving the viewers what they

want. There is a black comedy side as well, with the studio “police” taking their parts too literally and dealing with a scriptwriter who is a threat by wanting to change them; The script suffers from some overstate­ ment of the obvious and moralises too much, while the direction, by Paul Karo is not disciplined enough so that overacting also results. But there was a fine “police” perform ance by Frank W ilson, ex ­ television himself, who has now found a new career as a character actor in Melbourne theatre, closely followed by Jonathon Hardy as the ex-patriate writer, whose promise of a golden goose turns into a lame, tame duck.

The M.T.C. classics season at the Athenaeum, which was on a long run of disasters, has been redeemed by Ring Round the Moon. Under John Sumner’s direction, it has been lifted to a high level of farce, morality, muddle and style, with superb set by Anne Fraser, of the conservatory in which Anouilh’s people act out their redemption from the not-reallyso-sweet-life. A strong selection of players from the M.T.C. classic rep., at last cast correctly, presented several highly individ­ ual offerings, the best of which came from David Downer as the twin brothers Hugo and Frederic, and Bruce Myles as the deranged secretary B om belles, Irene Inescort as Madame Desmortes, the iron butterfly with wings of silk, and Sandy Gore as the dancing Lady India. Ron Challinor’s choreography was dreamy, also.

A Chorus Line has swept in from Sydney to Her Majesty’s to pump Melbourne full of post-Christmas adrenalin and super­ lative adjectives and leave both body and mind excited for long after the experience.

The flaws were a few flat spots in the singing, some Australian accents among the American, and a little too much pathos passed off for love. But these were forgotten in the pleasure of being so stimulated by the music, the words, the realism and the dancing which spun us up out of our seats and into great sensory delights. Not an event to be analysed, simply one to enjoy.

A pre-Christmas treat which exceeded expectations was Side by Side by Sondheim, at the Comedy. The better reception than it got in Sydney was no doubt due to the improved expertise of Bartholomew John, Jill Perryman and Geraldine Morrow, now more familiar from experience and able to refine the numbers. But it is believed the show got a great lift from the new presence of Noel Ferrier, the compere and go-between, who ad libbed at his most funny and fierce. The others, as did the audience, had a very positive response to him.

The Australian Performing Group, after a fairly flat 1977, got going early for the New Year with A M ad World, My Masters, at the Pram Factory, which enabled them to be their best at their most boisterous and irreverent. A bleak comedy

by English dramatist Barrie Keeffe, which leaves nobody unscathed in a class war, it is a brilliant (if treasonable!) post-script to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year, thanks to actors Tim Robertson, Bruce Spence and Kerry Dwyer, and the A.P.G. collective for deciding to get on with a production to get

us thinking about our society and corruption.

Marvellous, Melbourne needed the nudge!

The value of the play lies in its essential compassion for people.

IAN ROBINSON Dusa, Fish. Stas & Vi by Pam Q am s. Mel­ bourne Theatre Company and Parachute Productions Pty. Ltd., Russell Street, Melbourne, Vic. Opened 24 January, 1978. Director, Q aorge O gllvie; Designer, M arae M an zal.

Vi, V lvian n a G arrett; Dusa, N ancya Hayas; Fish, Carol Burns; Stas, Pat Bishop.

To m ost A ustralians, including Australian critics, ‘to criticise’ seems to mean ‘to find fault with’. But I believe that the central role of the critic is to point to what is valuable or useful or notable in any work, to say what it is that an audience might get out of it.

To do this it is sometimes necessary to discourage false expectations of a play by also saying what it is not. The most important misconception to correct about Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi is that it is a feminist tract, a piece of didactic theatre.

This is by no means the case. The lasting impression one has of the play is that it is an humane and caring piece of writing.

The fact that the four characters in it are all women seems almost incidental — the value of the play lies in its essential compassion for people.

Of course, being a play by a woman about women, the trials and tribulations, extasies and exhalations of the second sex provide the specific and concrete occasion for the expression of this concern. But Pam Gems does not seem to be involved in making political or philosophical points about women in general. Her intention

seems to be to expose us to a short period in the lives of four women in order to present them both as women and persons.

Set out in simple terms, the plot smacks of Number 96. The action takes place in a London flat inhabited by four diverse females. Vi is heavily into yoga and mysticism. Housewife Dusa’s husband has left her, kidnapped their children and fled overseas. Fish is a political activist who has split with her boyfriend. Stas is a nurse who is making extra money on the side working as an escort girl, in order to fulfil her ambition to study marine biology in Hawaii.

Vi eventually collapses from mal­ nutrition, and comes back from hospital a changed person, mainly due to the pills she is on. Dusa finally gets her children back.

Fish cannot live with her own obsessive­ ness about her lost lover and commits suicide. Stas finally accumulates all her money and buys her ticket to Hawaii. The difference between this and the soap opera is Pat Gems’ real concern for the characters she has created and her skill in presenting them with great depth and understanding.

The playwright has been well served by the M.T.C. production. George Ogilvie, by recruiting outside the M.T.C. regulars, has put together a very talented cast. The four actors in question—Vivienne Garrett, Nancye Hayes, Carol Burns and Pat Bishop—give sustained and sensitive per­ formances. The director and cast have achieved a real sense of actors playing together rather than playing as individuals to an audience; an ensemble feel often missing from M.T.C. productions.

George Ogilvie has created a balanced and well-paced action, although the relationship he wished to set up between actor and audience was not always clear.

Sometimes we were unsure whether we were expected to be invisible voyeurs through the fourth wall, or a palpable presence sharing jokes and insights with the characters and being wittingly shown off to by them.

Designer Marcee Menzel has resisted the trend towards overstatement in recent M.T.C. sets and given us the very minimal amount of clutter which perfectly supports

Nancye Hayes (Dusa), Vivienne Garrett THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

21

Theatre / Queensland

Carol Burns (Fish), Nancye Hayes (Dusa), in Dusa, Fish, Stas & Vi. Photo: David Parker the action without getting in its way. The most unsatisfying thing about the play was its ultimately depressed and depressing view of life. Despite all her humanity, Pam Gems seems unable to see her characters in any but a pessimistic way. She offers us no way out, no glimpse of hope, no light at the end of the tunnel.

One is getting a bit tired these days of being told it as it is. Hasn’t anyone got a realistic vision of what it might be or, at least, how we might begin to get there?

Possibly the best thing the MTC have presented at the Athenaeum since they took it over.

RAYMOND STANLEY ‘B reaker’ Morant by K enn eth Ross. Mel­ bourne Theatre Company, Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne. Opened 2 February, 1978.

Directed and designed by John Su m n er.

‘Breaker’ Morant, T e re n c e Donovan; George Witton, G ary Day; Peter Handcock, John Stanton; 1st Interrogator, President of Court Martial, B arry H ill; 2nd Interrogator, Dr. Johnson, Officer, E dw ard H epple; 3rd Interrogator, Mr. Robinson, Officer, Colonel Hamilton, Anthony Hawkins; Major Thomas, Jonathan Hardy; Major Bolton, Q erard M aguire; Kitchener, Simon C h llvers; Sergeant, Major Drummitt, Rob H arrison ; Trooper, Trooper Botha, Trooper, G ary Down; Corporal, Captain Taylor, Corporal, M ichael Edgar; Trooper, Corporal Sharp, Trooper, Roy Baldw in; Trooper, Van Rooyan, Trooper, Ian Suddards; Trooper, Officer, Trooper, P eter Dunn; Officer, Detlef Bauer; Trooper, M ichael M o rrell.

22

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

With the possible exception of The Wild Duck, ‘Breaker’ Morant is the best thing the Melbourne Theatre Company has presented at the Athenaeum since it took over the one-time cinema early last year.

Harry Morant, the son of an English admiral and born in Devon, came to Australia about 1884, where he was first employed on cattle stations droving and breaking in horses. Later he became a bush poet and a contributor to The Bulletin and other publications.

On outbreak of the Boer War Morant enlisted and became a lieutenant. Follow­ ing the orders of a senior officer (and going against his own instincts) he and fellow lieutenant Handcock had Boer prisoners court-martialled and shot for committing atrocities. Because of this the two officers were themselves court-martialled (the senior officer who gave the orders had since died) and, although the original instructions were said to have come from Kitchener, they were executed.

After a rather confusing beginning, establishing the various characters, it rapidly becomes a fascinating document­ ary-type drama. It is mainly centred around the actual court-martial with flashbacks. Possibly author Kenneth Ross has sometimes stuck too closely to facts and, not knowing enough of the main characters’ backgrounds, has not dared to guess or elaborate, and so somehow the roles occasionally appear under-written.

Director Sumner has, in the main, achieved one of his finest jobs, incor­ porating useful slides of the period and striking lighting effects. Sumner has, however, failed to restrain his customary tendency to play for cheap laughs, as for instance the heavy parade stamping of feet when certain soldiers go in and out of the witness box.

In most cases members of the M.T.C. excel in performances. In the title role Terence Donovan provides a rounded character with a sense of gusty humour, manages to convey well Morant’s more intellectual side and also deftly handles the recitation of his poetry. He is well backed

by John Stanton and Gary Day as the two soldiers court-martialled with him. Out­ standing as the President of the Court is Barry Hill, and Gerard Maguire makes a fine prosecuting officer, whilst Edward Hepple, Anthony Hawkins and Michael Edgar provide several telling cameos.

The only really discordant note in the production for me (and here it is obvious others are not in agreement) is the interpretation of the defence officer by Jonathan Hardy. For some odd reason, although clearly written straight and probably much more effective had it been performed that way, Hardy builds up a mild, bumbling amusing character which has echoes of Peter Sellars, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman and goodness knows who.

It frequently goes against the lines and, for me at least, grates and spoils some otherwise fine ensemble playing.

I understand two screenplays have already been written about Morant, but apparently have not been acceptable.

Maybe someone will pick up this script by Kenneth Ross, which would appear to be ideal film material.

RICHARD FOTHERINGHAM Flight Path by B everly M ahoney.

Queensland Theatre Company at S.G.I.O. Theatre, Brisbane, Queensland. Opened 25 January, 1978.

Director, Alan E d w ard s; Designer, Fiona R eilly; Stage Manager, Rick M ackayScollay; Lighting Design, D e re k C am p bell.

Mavis,

Pat Thom son; Ian, M ark B a tters h ill; Trevor, Douglas Hedge; Jan, C la ire C ro w th e r; Tony, David C len d in ning; Susan, Fay K elton; Andrew, Roger N ew com be; Police Sergeant, Russell N ew m an ; Police Constable, Ron Layne.

There were sixty-three entries for the Q.T.C.’s Playwriting Competition, and Beverly Mahoney’s Flight Path was the unanimous choice of the three judges. One of them, the Q.T.C.’s Artistic Director Alan Edwards, has directed the subse­ quent production, and I’m told that all concerned have worked furiously to make the script live. They’ve been rewarded by a puzzling, unexpected, but undeniable commercial success.

Flight Path compares the lives of two Brisbane women. Mavis, a single women with at least four children, lives at Cribb Island—an extremely depressed bay area soon to be resumed for airport runway extensions. Susan ‘the daughter of Queen­ sland’s most outspoken politician’ lives at Hamilton—Brisbane’s Toorak or North Shore, but geographically at the other end of the same airport. The rich and the poor both have their eardrums shattered, and the principal idea behind the play is that two women so different in their class backgrounds can have their lives shattered regardless of their bank balances.

In the original script, Mavis’s son Ian breaks into the Hamilton house intent on theft and brains Susan when she catches him; but this is the only link between the two households. The process of script revision has turned what another judge called an “austere study of two women” into a well made play bristling with coincidence. Susan’s friend Jan becomes Ian’s teacher, and the plot consequences of this extend the chain of coincidence to a ridiculous length; the same judge however

Theatre/S A felt that the commercial success of the production was very much the result of this dramatic reconstruction. Beverly Mahoney told me she was quite happy with the changes she’d been asked to make, and at least one production idea—the simul­ taneous staging of the Hamilton and the Cribb Island settings—contributed strong­ ly to the visual presentation of her avowed theme, although it meant a major constructual revision of the script. I haven’t read the original draft, but I suspect that the character of Ian is improved by her being able to go from one house to the other, and that this is the major positive spin off from the well-made reconstruct­ ion.

Ultimately however no amount of tinkering for either artistic or commercial reasons can hide the fact that Flight Path is trivial and limp stuff. The idea that two women so different in their backgrounds could be united by common oppression is one with current value, but the author seems to be only dimly aware of this theme. Her Hamilton household is a tissue-thin imitation of soap opera, with Susan a creature of passive indulgence.

Life on Cribb is more perceptively presented and Pat Thomson’s Mavis is the major character and the major perform­ ance in the play. But try as one may to feel warm towards a local writer and a commendable effort by the Q.T.C., it’s still true by any criteria that this is an apprentice script by a writer largely ignorant of the possibilités of theatre and unaware of the requirements of good dialogue. Nevertheless it’s been a local success, and that in itself is a step forwards for writing in Queensland.

A skilfully contrived chamber piece for four performers.

DON BATCHELOR Small Change by P ete r G ill. La Boite Theatre, Brisbane, Qld. Opened 3 February, 1978.

Director, Rick B lllln gh u rst.

Gerard, M ichael M cC affrey; Mrs Harte, Eileen Beatson; Vincent, M ark Bayly; Mrs Driscoll, Bev Langford.

Small Change is a 1976 English play having its Australian premiere in this production.

It is a skillfully contrived chamber piece for four performers which is well worth a place in the theatrical currency. However, it cannot measure up to the critical inflation apparently afforded it by Harold Hobson...“as much a challenge as Waiting for Godot was twenty years ago”. There is nothing innovative about the play’s method. It reasserts simply but well the age-old values of the actor, of the spoken word, and of the “imaginary forces” of an audience.

The playwright, Peter Gill, shows himself a capable craftsman. His language

is highly evocative and falters only in certain over-effusive passages given to the dreamer, Gerard. Gill presents the lives of his four richly drawn characters—two Cardiff mums and their respective sons— in a sort of mosaic form. All possible combinations of actors are explored with plenty of variety and colour (though not with enough humour), and the scenes leap about in time and space gradually fitting together like a jig-saw puzzle. What emerges is a picture of four meagre lives, limited by working class circumstances and an inability to make loving connection with one another. The central pathos is provided by an unrealised “love” affair between Gerard and Vincent, which is handled sensitively and without mawkish­ ness. Its genesis is in a memory Vincent has of seeing a young boy through a window, dancing...“he couldn’t have been more than nine”. Gerard is aware that he has been watched, and years later, in adolescence, this incident gives him the confidence to draw the other boy into some minor sexual adventures. Yet, when Vincent responds, Gerard backs off, fearful that their love may in some way be insufficient.

For each of the boys, Mum looms significantly in the background, but firmly on stage, whereas all other family members are present only in reminiscences and anecdotes. Gerard’s mother is grittily independent and finally very alone, shutting herself off in an old peoples’ home. The other Mum has married beneath herself and is torn by infatuation for her husband, guilt about neglecting the children, and despair about their material circumstances—all carried to the point of suicide.

What is good about the play is that it does not ignore the responsibility the people bear for being short-changed by life. What reduces it all is the feeling that the attraction between the two boys does not amount to a love that could last. This weakens the play at its heart.

The production, by Rick Billinghurst, displays his usual admirable qualities in handling this sort of play—economy, pace, and a good ear for verbal orchestration.

There is patience and that special sensi­ bility needed to make detail live.

The performers are disciplined, sen­ sitive, and well cast. Michael McCaffrey continues to mature as an actor of technical facility. He has happily rid his work of an arch quality which once infected it. On this occasion, there was a lack of commitment to the romantic bent of the character so that his “poetical” outbursts sounded hollow. Eileen Beatson was the best I have ever seen her, investing Mrs. Harte with world-weary resignation which was never sentimental. Whilst physically good, her speech was blurred by occasional lazy vocal lapses. By compari­ son, Bev Langford was exemplary in this area. Indeed, hers was a high quality performance all round, taut yet well controlled, deeply introspective yet clearly projected. Mark Bayly was vocally only adequate, but his portrayal of the Vincent character had a directness, simplicity, and truth which would be the envy of many veteran actors.

After the demise of the extravagant Ned Kelly local Lofty wasn’t too bad.

BRUCE McKENDRY Three Australian plays workshopped. S.A. Creative Workshops.

Errol Flynn’s Great Big Adventure Book fo r Boys, Stage Company, Sheridan Theatre.

Happy End Sheridan Theatre.

Inevitably Adelaide simmers in a pre Festival lull. The theatregoer faces lost nights of inventing spectacles or a visit to a cinema to take in yet another Australian movie. However the impassioned per­ formances in the Dunstan-Salsbury epic continue to enthrall its audience.

One group that one can rely on for consistant entertainment is the South Australian Creative Workshops. Having been in existence for five years now some overall policy seems to have evolved. With few other resources than people and energy the group moves in low budget, thought provoking regions. Being mostly part-timers the standard of performance by its members is really creditable. Under the direction of Martin Christmas, who has managed to weather the Adelaide cultural rapids, S.A.C.W. “is an in­ dependent company pursuing a non-elitist path via unusual or new plays that have something to say.”

The plays they produced at their Warehouse Theatre (yes it was hot) were I ’ve come about the Assassination by Tony Morphett; Out at Sea by Slavomir Mrozeck and Frenzy for Two by Eugene Ionesco. The plays revealed a good company at work (and not always on good material) under concise and to the point direction. Being mostly allied to the teaching trade a slightly educational approach to acting surfaced. Out at Sea provided an apt platform for actress Anne Demidowicz and Ionescos’ piece simply good theatre well done.

A new company to emerge in answer to the South Australian Theatre Company’s institutional and non-exploratory policies is the Stage Company. They intend to operate on a professional basis but meantime perform at the Sheridan home of the Adelaide Theatre Group where all service are devotional. Under the direction of Brian Debnam, formerly of the S.A.T.C., the company staged Errol THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

23

Flynn’s Great Big Adventure Book for Boys by Rob George.

It is interesting that Rob George wrote a rock musical called Lofty which had a low budget presentation at Her Majesty’s Theatre and now Adelaide’s very own Opera Theatre. Many are saying after the demise of the extravagant Ned Kelly that local Lofty wasn’t too bad after all. Mr. George rises once more from a dreadful fate of TV commercials and critical scorn.

Director Malcolm Blaylock, ex co­ director of the Circle Theatre Co., which crumbled with L ofty’s poor reception and poor houses, is now active amongst the local theatre groups. Lately he directed a production of Brecht’s Happy End at the Sheridan again. A great cry has gone up amongst the theatre hirers of Adelaide because the university which used to be a cheap source of venues, namely the Little Theatre and the Union Theatre, have upped the hire charges, taking them out of the question for amateur groups. In reply to the lack of economic performing areas and the need for a good dancing space the Australian Dance Theatre and the Assoc­ iation of Community Theatres have con­ verted an ex-ballroom, ex-ballet studio into what is now the Balcony Theatre.

Unusual in design and exciting in possi­ bilities it is to be opened on the 24th of February and thereafter to be danced in by interstate groups during the Festival of Arts.

And Adelaide pauses for the wave to reawaken. Every second year everyone is mad with what they’ve seen, what they should have seen and what they are about to see. Hail the Festive time when the state bequeaths its gifts.

Classically uplifting and can be theatrically flamboyant.

TONY BAKER Oedipus The King. Oedipus A t Colonus by Sophocles. Translated by John Lewin. South Australian Theatre Co., The Playhouse, Adelaide S.A. Opened 25 February, 1978.

Director, Colin Q oorge; Costume, mask design, Tan ya M o lselw itsch ; set design, Richard Roberts.

Oedipus, Denis O lsen; Priest, Messenger, Antigone, Robin B o w erin g; Creon, John Qaden; Tiresias, Man from Corinth, Ismene, Edw in H odgem an; Locesta, Polyneices, Man of Cobrius, Messenger, Ronald F alk; Old Shepherd, Theseus, K evin M iles; Chorus Leader, Brian Jam es; Chorus, Judy D avis, Colin

F rie ls ,

M ichael

F u lle r,

Mel

Qlbson, W ayne J a rra t, C hris M ahoney, Tony P rehn, P ete r S c h w a rz, M ichael S ib e rry, Paul S o n k ella , M ich ele S tay n e r.

24 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Oedipus thoughtfully contemplating the Sphinx whose riddle he was able to answer.

From a 5th century Kylix.

Apart from being a complex play, Oedipus is a good choice as a festival production. After all this drama, or rather dramas, were written for the Dionysiac festivals two and a half thousand years ago. Then how better for the State company to mark the latest arts festival in the Athens of the South?

Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, which the South Australian Theatre Company presents in one evening in just under three hours with an interval, are also classically uplifting and can be theatrically flamboyant, the very stuff of festivals.

The SATC in its Playhouse home brought out the big guns for the occassion.

Director Colin George and designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, working very much in tandem with the production, behind the scenes and Denis Olsen and Edwin Hodgeman heading those on stage.

The conception follows classic con­ vention with the actors masked, wearing platform shoes (looking, such are the vagaries of fashion, in this quite modish) making largely stylised gestures and men taking the women’s parts (liberationists take heart, there are female actors in the chorus).

In these circumstances the choice of Olsen and Oedipus on his long, tragic and pathetic journey is an especially good one.

With the character masked, voice takes on an added importance and the Olsen voice, honed on the work of conventional playwrights and polished on Gilbert and Sullivan, is an expressive and powerful instrument heard here to very good effect.

But in such circumstances, too, the production stands or falls on the designer and director. Miss Moiseiwitsch is cele­ brated for her work with Sir Tyrone Guthrie and later with the Royal Shakes­ peare and the National in London.

The concept for the SATC follows through her pioneering work there. The set is minimal and austere, such artefacts as there are symbolic and the masks are powerful, even elemental, to provoke a proper awe among an audience watching men caught up in their destiny, creatures of the gods but archetypal themselves.

While the total design is obviously the work of one hand there are differences in the two halves of the evening. The tragic, and to my mind more successful, Oedipus the King is dark in colour and sombre in tone quite startlingly so for those accus­

tomed to think of the attic world as a place of light and purity among the olive groves.

This Thebes may be a place of kings and gods and fate. It is also a place of tribal savagery.

Oedipus at Colonus where the pathetic self-blinded old man finally reaches his mysterious end is lighter in look and feel.

The chorus masks have a more tolerant, human look. They also have a byzantine look which I least found occasionally jarred.

Some of the effects used had been seen in the company’s Macbeth some months back, masks and red streamers for blood, for instance, together with movement techniques. Then it was disconcerting.

Here it was much more successful.

Mention of movement provides an opportunity for mention of Michael Fuller.

His work has previously been well worth watching. For this production it is a delight. The difficult chorus is handled very well and while both plays have at times a balletic quality it is not at the expense of the words.

There is not the space here for a further analysis of Sophocles, his world and that of Oedipus but the elements highlighted in Mr. George’s interpretation are those of hubris, the overweening pride the gods find so intolerable and sometimes con­ flicting notions (to the modern mind anyway) of disaster by chance, of destiny and of the virtues of living by the law.

Although in such a production the actors’ place is secondary particular mention should be, besides Olsen and Hodgeman, of Ronald Falk who on opening night in another, later classic tradition overcame an attack of mumps to appear and to perform exceedingly well as Iocaster and Polyneices and of Brian James as chorus leader. Mention, too, in an unhappier way of Kevin Miles as the old shepherd in Oedipus the King. He enters with a kind of bowlegged strut which is irrelevant to the play and which he has affected too often in his SATC roles.

There are, then, faults in this evening’s theatre. But it is theatre in the traditional sense, the clash of symbols and height­ ened, unique experience. It enlists the intelligence and the emotions, no-one could regard this entertainment as less than or imitative of cinema and television.

Theatre hot and strong, that is what festivals are all about.

Theatre/N SW The ingredients are pre-packed, the recipe is sim ple...

NORMAN KESSELL

Intellectual diversion or sketches preciously treated?

ROBERT PAGE Nimrod Theatre Downstairs, Sydney, NSW. Opened 10 February, 1978.

There is an air of preciousness at the Nimrod Downstairs present offering. The three plays range from a tribute to the Marx Brothers comedy team — not the political propagandist — through a plightof-w om an divertissem ent, to a “Sprechstucke” (see, it’s catching), or 1,100 assorted aphorisms without stage directions or assignment of speaking parts; from Marxisms to maxims if you like.

The first two pieces by Moya Henderson are both delicious — especially for the actors — and fully accessible, almost to the point of being pedestrianly so. Playlet one is a series of classic poses and routines culminating in a love affair between Groucho and a cello with all the innuendo that string-tickling and curvaceous line following afford. The ingenuous portrayal of Harpo, later metamorphosing into Chico, by cellist Pierre Emery was received first with endeared patronage then aston­ ishment when he turned to his real craft as musician—even playing the cumbersome instrument classical guitar fashion. With Groucho almost a parody of himself any impersonation milks laughs, but John McTernan gave nothing short of a rejuvenation, with all the incompetent authority, sentimental core, and toothy, cigared grin finely studied.

Stubble is not much more than a sketch with Jennifer McGregor putting her fine voice to the service of a woman’s primping and preening toilet as she prepares for the night out. She plucks and snips her way through the facial and bodily hair—to v o c a l a c c o m p a n im e n t— ey e b r o w s, moustache, armpits, nipples and pubes, then dons a fur coat (get it?) and off into the night. A surrealist tinge is added by the vanity cabinet including an enormous mechanical mouth presumably symbol­ ising the carnivorousness of the male.

My concern about these two plays is that despite their author receiving the Kranicksteiner Prize of 1974, they are really the stuff of Monty Python, i.e. university revue, given some fake respect-

Jennifer McGregor in Nimrod’s Stubble.

Photo; Robert McFarlane. ability and artiness by their musical requirements: viz, a cellist for the first a soprano for the second.

“Don’t put an empty head on an intelligent pillow” is one of the miriad of aphorisms whispered, sung, barked, cried, taped, and hurled at the audience through K rausm ann’s E verym an. John B ell’s direction, as with the first two shorts, has endowed the cast with a tremendous assurance and delivery but in some senses to my mind has gone against the intention of the text. All it is is 1,100 sentences devoid of plot, situation, character, etc. but it is these which Bell constantly and variously attempts to re-impose on the script. If the piece is as he notes “a legitimate challenge to what constitutes our ideas of ‘drama’ ” then falling back on various im provisation excersises, b e­ ginning with the well-worn mirror game (actors aping each other’s movements), through barber’s shop quartet singing, through market research interviews, through teacher and pupil relationships and so on, seems rather to duck the issue in a way, say, that one can’t with Beckett’s Play (1964) where three actors are stuck in urns to deliver three broken monologues.

There a story emerges (twice!). Here the cascade of mock truths can only point up the absurdity of man trying verbally to categorize his experience. The sheer stylishness (not to mention memory faculty) of the whole somewhat leavens the doubts but one couldn’t dismiss the feeling of this being a trip back into the sixties, even the poster derives from early 60’s pop art, and to have gained finesse though lost vitality and that sense of “profound mystification” in the ageing process.

Handke’s sentences in Offending the A u dien ce (1966) and S elf-accu sation (1966) questioned theatre and self develop­ ment respectively in a much more cogent fashion. Indeed both the playwrights owe much to the German tradition—one is of Austrian birth, the other just back from a three year sojourn there—and wholly indebted to its cerebral approach, seized upon I’m sure after that race missed out on the Renaissance which swept the rest of Europe. Full credit to the performers, Nicholas Enright (welcome back), Jennifer McGregor and John McTernan again, and Anna Volska but finally rather an evening of sketches treated preciously than the intellectual diversion expected.

Edith Piaf Je Vous Aime, a musical tribute devised by Libby Morris. Marian Street Theatre (opened 1st February, 1978). Director, A las tair Duncan; designer, M ichael O ’Kane; choreography, Leith Little; musical direction, C raig Scott; new English lyrics by Fran Landesm an, Ronnie Bridges and P eter Reeves; additional material by A las tair Duncan; musical arrangements by C huck M allet, Ronnie Bridges and P eter Reeves.

With Bunny Gibson, Doug K ingsm an, M aureen E lkn er, Rod Dunbar.

There are obvious reasons for the continuing spate of small-scale musicals based on the work of single composers or performers. The ingredients are pre­ packed, the recipe is simple and the mixture fairly economical to prepare and to serve.

So far we have imported such variable concoctions as Cole, Cowardy Custard, Tarantara! Tarantara! and Side By Side

by Sondheim. Melbourne even enjoyed one tasty home-cooked sample, but the local chefs over-looked a vital preservative called copyright and the dish went sour!

In Sydney, so far, the best offerings have been at the enterprising Marian Street Theatre, always well presented with care­ fully selected trimmings, thereby earning well-deserved kudos and lucre. Maitre d’Alastair Duncan opened his 1978 season with a piquant sample of the genre — Edith Piaf, Je Vous Aime, a collation of the Little Sparrow’s best-loved songs with a light dressing of narrative sauce.

This was a trifle tasty enought to tempt most palates, but it was savored to its fullest, I feel, only by the connoisseurs, the dedicated Piaf fans. As one of the latter, I played a small part in promoting this nostalgic feast. Writing of Bunny Gibson’s performance in Irma La Douce at this theatre, I compared her voice to that of Piaf. Alastair Duncan then told her, in roughly these words: “One day there’ll be a show about Piaf. If we can get it you’ll play in it.” Well, Canadian-born actress Libby Morris eventually came good with the show, Alastair got the rights and Bunny is there, as promised.

This show is different to its predecessors in that there are no dramatised incidents and no one speaks as Piaf. It is left entirely to the descriptive nature of the songs plus commendably short narrative notes drawn from the biography written by Edith’s half sister and lifelong companion. Simone Bertault (W.H. Allen, London, 1970) to sketch in superficially her birth in a Paris street in 1915, her unbringing in a brothel, THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

25

her success as a singer, her parade of lovers, her addiction to alcohol and drugs, her tragic end in 1963.

The thirty three songs in the show were shared between the four performers— Bunny Gibson, Maureen Elkner, Doug Kingsman and Rod Dunbar. The women were magnificent, the men a mistake. This was no discredit to them, both skilled and proven performers. It was simply that trying to balance the sexes to please mixed audiences did not work. They faced an impossible task tackling songs written solely for so individualistic a singer as Piaf.

Kingsman scored best with personalised versions of “ C atherine” and “ The Lovers”, but Dunbar, though he sang and danced well in the concerted numbers was quite bad in his solo efforts at simulating the Piaf vocal style.

It probably would have been too much for the two women to sustain the whole show alone—Maureen Elkner’s voice was beginning to show strain at the end of the night I was there—but four women would have been better, even if two of them were to handle only the less distinctive songs.

Bunny Gibson had most of the betterknown numbers—“La Vie En Rose”, “ The A ccord ioniste” , “ M ilord” , “Amsterdam”, “Les Blouses Blances” and “Je Ne Regrette Rien”— but Maureen Elkner had a show-stopper in “The Right to Love” and scored also with “Mon Legionnaire”, “I Don’t Care”, “Mon Dieu” and “Cri de Coeur” .

A special pleasure was to hear many of the songs sung in English for the first time, with excellent new translations by Frank Landesman, Ronnie Bridges and Peter Reeves.

I was disappointed in the women’s dressing—unbecoming modern frocks in pastel pink and blue respectively, with assorted colored scarves for variety. In the second half, at least, they should have been in black, which Piaf invariably insisted on wearing when performing.

Direction by Alastair Duncan, respon­ sible for some additional material, was well-served by Keith Little’s choreography and excellent musical backing directed by bass player Craig Scott.

Michael O’Kane, from the Old Tote Company, provided a neatly serviceable set using subdued but evocative backprojection.

The backdrop... was a star performance in its own right LUCY WAGNER Ned Kelly, written, directed and designed by Reg L iverm ore; music by P a tric k F lynn .

Adelaide Festival Centre Trust and Eric Dare in asscn with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney, NSW. Opened 4 February 1978. Musical direction and arrangements, M ichael Carlos; Choreo­ graphy, K eith Bain.

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Ned Kelly, N ick T urbin ; Aaron Sherritt, Je re m y Paul; Joe Byrne, Doug P arkinson; Superintendent Hare, A rth u r Dignam ; Ma Kelly, Q era ld in e T u rn e r; Mr Tarleton, T im oth y Bean; Kate, B everley Evans; Steve Hart, Ric H e rb ert; Dan Kelly, Stephen Thom as; G raham Low ndes, Paul Sm ythe.

When Ned Kelly opened in Adelaide, Shirley Despoja of the Adelaide Advertiser gave vent to one of the most vitriolic attacks on a show that has been seen for some time. Her main dislikes of the piece were that it cost a lot of money, that it used a lot of technical tricks, that it had lavish publicity, that it was “vulgar” and “pre­ tentious” and that the show was mounted with loving care!

Ms Despoja’s complaints seem, then, to be that Ned Kelly was a big theatrical show; the very grounds on which I found it a reasonably enjoyable production.

Certainly the money spent showed in the sets and technical effects; the visual and musical aspects of the opera are its greatest strengths. Even from the striking board with Ned Kelly’s words in eighteen inch high letters, that acts as curtain before the opening, and the slow, silent start on Spencer Street Station where carefully controlled dry ice filters the dimensional red and green platform lights as Superintendent Hare (Arthur Dignam) collects his police force to start the journey to Glenrowan, the atmosphere is built by the sets. The impressionistic wooden structures at the side of the stage readily support the identity of police station, hotel, bank, pub, prison and finally gallows.

The backdrop made entirely of hurri­ cane lanterns was certainly an “effect” without much more relevance, but as a background to a solo from the eponymous Ned it was a star performance in its own right. Other staging techniques, though, were purely theatrical and far removed from indulgent expense. The use of cloth throughout was stunningly effective, as

when Joe shoots his best friend, the traitor Aaron Sherritt, and rather than fake blood he pulls from Aaron’s stomach a long band of red gauze. Likewise Ma Kelly’s lines of washing, squares and triangles of cloth traversing the stage, made the contrast of lightness, warmth and fresh­ ness to the dark oppressiveness of so much else in the Kelly lives. Finally the Glenrowan fire, with growing sheets of flame-coloured cloth wafted between people, blown about and pulled up the back of the stage in increasing fury — and then switched abruptly to black, from behind which, Ned, in armour for the first1 and last time — was a most memorable image of elemental destruction, culmin­ ating in utter loneliness.

Patrick Flynn’s music may indeed cull a little from everywhere to make its whole, but it is a coherent and cohesive body of work of much greater depth than mere . sin g-along rhythm. The Livermore (/Ellis?) lyrics are at times moving and always articulate, but then they need to be for there is no dialogue, nor even much in the way of linking passages between the songs.

If the opera lacks a centre it is because of the major singers; Geraldine Turner as M a Kelly and Arthur Dignam as Super­ intendent Hare both turn in excellent performances, vocally and charismatically and it is unfortunate that they should in both respects surpass Nick Turbin as Ned. It seems sad that someone with a more powerful, even aggressive, stage presence should not have been cast, like Jon English as on the original record (or Mick Jagger in the film of the same name). Mr. Turbin puts over a basically agreeable personality, but scarcely one to sustain the angry, sad, bitter and finally exuberant facets of the character, though this is not to ignore the unstinting effort he brings to it.

If there is any theme taken up, extraneous to the basic facts of the story, it is a rather anomolous line on religion.

After his first murder Ned sings that he cannot return home as “Jesus shut the door” , which refrain recurs several times, but the song of his finale, a post mortem appearance, outlines the sentiment that people like Ned help us live in a world where we know there’s no heaven in the sky—yet is sung a la Salvation Army.

In these days of stringency it is a matter of habit to cringe at such words as “indulgence” and “extravagance”, but a rock opera is an expensive, showy medium and only successful as such. That the Kelly gang should appear in a mirror-ball balloon that is never seen again, and Ned’s armour should be saved solely for the Glenrowan siege is entirely suitable.

Chorus Line, though sparser to the eye apparently cost much more, and one wonders whether, had this been an import, the press response in Adelaide would not have been wholly different. Can’t we ever applaud our own and recognise that Reg Livermore is little short of a theatrical dynamo who might all too easily be lost to the international circuit. I congratulate the Festival Centre Trust too for daring so much. Let them not be disheartened from more ventures of this kind.

Successes and distresses ROBERT PAGE The Club — Nimrod at the Theatre Royal Prisoner o f Second A venue — Ensemble Treadmill — Ensemble at the Stables R ock’ola — Nimrod Upstairs The Cat and the Canary — Old Tote, Parade Theatre.

The Tempest — Old Tote, Drama Theatre.

M iss Ju lie/B la ck C om edy Old Tote Drama

Theatre.

Well, let’s not get carried away. Just as I was despairing at the sight of this new Ozymandias along comes M iss Julie and B lack C om edy in a double bill. The first didn’t quite build up the fetid, blood-up passion of a Scandinavian Midsummer’s Eve (despite Strindberg’s lines I think Julie should begin flushed not pale) though the sheer concentration and presence of Robyn Nevin, the eponymous Julie, brought all to rights. Of the second, the blue-rinses marvelled while the trendies denounced it as silly, but Shaffer’s play is a brilliant farce which I have never seen fail.

The major idea, from a famous Chinese play, is to have the lights on when they should be off and off when on: so we see Barry Otto and the rest of the cast groping around in blazing light, and apparently moving normally in total darkness, and confusion builds frenetically from there.

The only grounds for B lack C om edy being part of the supposed classic season seem to be that it was once coupled with M iss Julie at England’s National Theatre.

That was twelve years ago; I thought we were only eighteen months behind. But then the whole season is based on the National repertoire which shows that the apron strings are still as strongly held onto as ever. A sad situation, but nonetheless better and more effective than usual, even if the two plays in question prove strange bedfellows.

Having had year round ups in our last issue, John Bell’s careful and stylish production of The Club missed out.

Williamson, unquestionably Australia’s most successful playwright has scored again and had his ball in the net before the teams even turned out, with a transfer arranged before rehearsals began; theatre boardrooms are becoming as concerned as to where they stand in the audience stakes and financial league every bit as much as their Australian Rules counterparts. Well made, unashamedly commercial packag­ ing in the direction and, bar queries as to why Ron Haddrick overcomes being “smashed” too easily for naturalism, a sharp piece with, to my mind, a disturbing line of attack in how sincere, if overbrash, people can quickly find they have outlived their usefulness and be removed by sm ooth-tongued adm inistrators:, who these days seem to be the new ruling class.

W illiam son ’s American counterpart Neil Simon is also achieving high marks on the audience ratings at the tiny Ensemble.

Again - though more so - the comedy has its black side with the hero of Prisoner o f Second A ven u e moving quickly through retrenchment and breakdown to recon­ ciliation as the noisome, rack rented living, rotting garbage smelling, aspects of met­ ropolitan life become all too much. Brian Young is brilliant as the Prisoner taking all the moods readily in the stride of a well-seasoned actor; the wife, (Jinx Huber) who repeats the process, appears slighter at first but develops through accretion as the evening progresses.

Far less can be said of the Loma Bol’s T readm ill at the Ensembles’ newly acquired Stables Theatre. W ritten, directed and acted by women it should have been an exciting venture but largely suffered from portraying boredom boring­ lySplendid actor performances abound in Tim Gooding’s R o c k 'ola at Nimrod, but it has proved, I believe in Melbourne too where it had a simultaneous take off, to be a kamikaze flight not only of a washed up foursome from the sixties but theatrically too. At the Playwright’s Conference where it took a test flight sets were suggested by the mind’s eye; given them, there is little for the mind to do except attempt recognition of the thousands of 60’s song lyrics which bestrew the text. Two points, one: it was that decade’s life style and sub-cultural solidarity which - despite “American Pie” - died, not the music; two: actors even as top-flight as Robin Ramsay, Jacki Weaver, Kris McQuade and Tony Llewelyn-Jones can’t, without music at the least, have any of the presence of even the poorest pop group - a presence which the play constantly reaches for but never grasps. It could have been saved somewhat by recourse to a very large blue pencil and pair of scissors.

The Cat a n d the Canary has far less of the longuers but even less point, being everything one expects from the old comedy thriller. It has the polish which the Tote can often bestow, but the surface scarcely covers the disturbing clash of styles which look like a bob each way (straight thriller/farce) by director Collingwood. The state companies were to “ pursue ex cellen ce” according to Australia Council funding policy, but surely the quality was supposed to go more than skin deep.

It appears the epitome of yesterday’s men thinking for blue rinse appeal and as such an indictment of the artistic policy, of the company. Subsidy is about the right to fail, not (at nearly a million dollars a year) to succeed like this. It will of course pack them in, if word gets around the middle brow traps.

Will the tempest blowing around the Tote abate? Looking at its other offering in the Drama Theatre, I fear not. It seemed more than symbolic sitting there as the thunder rolled across the oppressive Drama Theatre ceiling, thinking it must cave in, and the Tote with it, at any moment. The set was a useless excressence (cell one side, hole in all too obvious flat at t’other for Miranda and Ferdinand’s chess game, arabesqued circle at centre) trying in a hopeless baroque fashion to cover the emptiness of, in my view, hopeless

m isdirection.

Acam p clod-hopping portrayal of Ariel, a Caliban who owed more to R oots than Shakespeare, and a Prospero a long way from the range and vocal prowess the part demands — not much Will Power here. Like poor Prosper all that seems left for the Tote at the moment is to “be reliev’d by prayer... which frees all faults”. Again its a raging success. “Look on my works....and despair!

Nothing remains of that colossal wreck....”

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

27

Playscript:

28

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

S lcf 3 m o ALL seated as supper finishes Miss Siss: That was a very satisfying supper, Mrs O’Mahon. It does you credit. The lamingtons were a delight. I always say one cannot have a social evening without lamingtons.

M ary: Thank you, Miss Siss. I’m pleased you liked them.

Miss Siss: I did. Well! Now that the inner man is refreshed and replenished what is the next thing on the agenda.

M ary: Would you like to see Christy in his soutane?

Miss Siss: Well, I wasn’t going to suggest that.

M ary: He looks beautiful in it.

Miss Siss: Perhaps he does. But, then again, is the occasion altogether suitable?

Denny: Mary, I don’t think its the most suitable time. It's... It’s not a fancy dress party.

M ary: Fancy dress party! What are you talking about? It’s his soutane! What do you think, Father?

O ’G orm an: Well. . . Well? What does Christy think?

M ary: Christy?

C h risty: No, Mum. No. I don’t want to put the soutane on. Anyway it’s packed away. All the pleats will get out of place.

M ary: So your grandfather’s not going to see you in your soutane before you leave.

Miss Siss: I was going to suggest that at this stage of the evening’s festivities Houses recite ‘Shamus O’Brien’.

M ary: Oh, for God’s sake, no! It lasts all night!

Let’s have some singing. Let’s hear Father Thurlie. I want to hear him. He’s got a beautiful voice. Haven’t you, Father?

O ’G orm an: Self praise is no absolution, Mary.

Miss Siss: For myself, I’d prefer to hear ‘Shamus O’Brien’.

M ary: Later! Later! When I’m doing the dishes.

I won’t have to listen to it. I’ve heard it all my life.

Miss Siss: Well, if you insist. It is your evening.

M ary: Thanks. I do insist.

Denny: Perhaps it might be better to hear Houses first.

Tocky: For myself I’d like to listen to Houses. I think he does a stirring job on ‘Shamus’.

Miss Siss: No, no. Thank you, Mr O’Mahon.

Thank you, Tocky. I can wait. Let Mrs O’Mahon have her own way.

T ocky: ‘Shamus O’Brien’ is very relaxing.

M ary: And so is Father O’Gorman. Listening to him will relax us all. You know I think he’s got a better voice than Bing Crosby.

O ’G orm an: You can’t compare me to the swinging Bing. Anyway he’s a crooner.

Houses: Crooners! There’s some awful singers about today. The Andrew Sisters! Ugh! They nearly make me puke! And frankly I don’t go for this Bing Crosby fellow much, either. I reckon he’s having a bad effect on the younger generation: all them bobbysoxers and shorthaired louts. Now the singer I like is Richard Crooks. Good, strong stuff.

T ocky: He’s got warts on his tonsils.

Houses: Who? Richard Crooks?

T ocky: No. Bing Crosby. That’s why he sings the way he does. It’s an affliction.

Houses: It’s an affliction listening to him.

Miss Siss: He’s a very good Catholic.

Houses (astounded): What! Bing Crosby a Catholic?

Miss Siss (primly): Mass and holy communion every Sunday; family rosary every night. I read it in The Annals o f Our Lady o f the Far East.

Houses (genuinely amazed): Well I never!

Fancy that! Go on! Bing Crosby a Catholic! I’ll have to listen to him a little more carefully.

Breda: What else would he be with a name like Crosby?

Miss Siss: It doesn’t always follow. Only last week I saw in the funeral notices in the Newcastle Morning Herald where an O'Sullivan was buried in the Presbyterian section of Sandgate Cemetry.

T ocky: That’s nothing! I saw something worse a couple of months ago: an O’Brien was cremated at Beresfield. Cremated!

Miss Siss (resignedly): We can only pray for them.

M ary: Father, will you sing now?

Houses: Sing ‘The Holy City’, Father.

O ’G orm an: I couldn’t manage it, Houses. It’s too high for me.

Houses: It’s a great song. Richard Crooks really handles it well.

He begins to sing.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem Lift up your gates and sing

O ’Gorm an (joins in): Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna to your king.

Houses (alone): Hosanna in the high...

My God! It is high! I’m no Richard Crooks. Get me a drink Denny.

Miss Siss: I don’t know why you rave on about Richard Crooks, Houses, when our own Count John McCormack has such a glorious voice. Now there’s a singer for you. The Boy from Athlone! The clearest, sweetest voice in the world.

Houses: You’re right, Miss Siss. A glorious voice. I remember him in Adelaide in 1917 when he was on his Australian tour. He gave a marvellous performance. And at the end of it the Adelaide audience stood up and sang “God Save the King’ at him!

O ’Gorm an: Sang ‘God Save the King’ at him?

What did they do that for?

Houses: Because he had become an American citizen. They let him know they didn’t approve.

Miss Siss: Well, Sydney treated him a little more politely. I well remember seeing him in the Sydney Town Hall. Such a magnificent presence. Such poise. He just stood on the stage and liquid gold poured from his mouth. His voice floated on his breath. I’ll never forget him singing ‘Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms’.

M ary: That’s it! That’s the song. ‘Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms’. I have the music here. Father can sing it. It’s just the song.

It’s just the song.

Miss Siss: I don!t think it’s the type of song Father would wish to sing.

M ary: Why not? What’s wrong with it? It’s a beautiful piece.

Miss Siss: It’s not exactly the most suitable song for a priest to sing.

M ary: Well, what do you want him to sing: ‘Hail Queen of Heaven’?

Miss Siss: That would be more suitable.

M ary: Come, Father. Let’s hear you sing ‘Believe M e..

O ’Gorm an: I could sing ‘The Mountains of Mourne’.

M ary: After you’ve sung ‘Believe Me’.

Denny (concerned): Mary, are you sure you can handle it?

M ary: Of course I can. Look! The nuns used to THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

29

say that I had the makings of another Eileen Joyce. Come, Father, I’ll give you an introduction.

She seats herself at the piano. O'Gorman takes up a 'tenor'position, arm resting on the top o f the piano, facing Mary. He waits fo r Mary to fin d the music. It appears that she is going to play. But as her fingers reach towards the keyboard, she stares at the music completely frozen. O ’G orman quietly bends down to her.

O ’Gorm an: All I need is the note, Mary. I can sing without accompaniment.

M ary: No! No! I must accompany you. (She peers at the score, trying to concentrate on the music.) There! There! That’s it! Perfect! Grand!

I’m right now.

O 'Gorman begins to sing, gazing at Mary. Miss Siss looks askance at him. Mary looks up rapturously at O'Gorman, who is pleased that she is now smiling. He sings to her. She tries to accompany him, but makes a hopeless mess o f the music. O'Gorman, discomfited, tries gamely to sing above the cacophony. Miss Siss thumps her walking stick on the floor, bringing the song to an end.

Miss Siss: That will be enough! That will be enough!

M ary: What do you mean — enough?

Miss Siss: I think we've heard enough.

M ary: But Father hasn't finished yet! He’s singing beautifully! Beautifully!

Miss Siss: I think we’ve heard enough, Mrs O’Mahon.

M ary: He sounds just like John McCormack.

Miss Siss: Father O’Gorman is no John McCormack; and you're no Eileen Joyce.

M ary: I never said I was.

Miss Siss: I think it’s time we heard Houses recite ‘Shamus O’Brien’.

M ary: Not in here! Not in here! Over my dead body!

Denny: Calm yourself, Mary. Where else can we hear Houses if not in here.

M ary: You can all go out on the front verandah and listen to the blessed thing out there. But not in here!

Miss Siss: The front verandah! That might be a good idea. It’ll be much cooler out there. It is a trifle warm in here.

Denny: Yes. That might be just the thing.

Miss Siss: Well, let’s go. Come Houses! We’ll hear ‘Shamus O’Brien’ yet! Come, Father. I want to hear you sing The Lark in the Clear Air’.

She walks out followed by Houses and Tocky.

O ’Gorman hesitates, his loyalty with Mary, but eventually follows, only to return immediately for the unopened bottle o f whisky.

O ’Gorm an: For the vocal chords.

M ary: He’s gone. She won.

Denny: M ary... Are you going to join us?

M ary: No! Leave me alone! You can all get out!

Denny: Mary, will you try and pull yourself together. There’s no need to be going on the way you’re doing.

M ary: Leave me alone, Denny. You go out with the rest of them.

30

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Denny: Are you sure you’re all right? Is there anything I can get you?

M ary: Christy can get me a Bex powder.

(Denny signifies to Christy who exits.) You’d better go out with the rest of them. Go on.

Denny goes at Breda’s gesture. Breda pours herself a whisky and lights a cigarette. Enter Christy.

C hristy: There's no Bex. Dad must have finished them. You all right. Mum? Mum. . I'll dress up in the soutane, if you want me to.

M ary (shaking her head): No, Christy. Not now. It's time you were getting ready for bed. (sudden thought, brightening) Christy! You could dress up in your new pyjamas and dressing gown and slippers! You can be ready to say goodnight to them when they come back. And Christy! Christy! Put your biretta on!

C hristy: Aw, Mum. M ary: Yes! Your biretta!

Breda: Go on now, love.

Breda beckons Christy away. Christy exits, puzzled.

Breda: He’s going to look a geek in his dressing gown and biretta, Mary. A real geek!

M ary: He’ll look beautiful, Breda! Beautiful!

My little priest!

Breda pours Mary a whisky and takes it to her.

M ary: I don’t want a drink, Breda.

Breda: There’s no Bex: you might as well have this.

Mary gulps the whisky. Breda massages Mary.

M ary: Thanks, Breda. I thought Father Thurlie was singing beautifully. And it was wonderful accompanying him. The old bitch! “That will be enough”. Who does she think she is? “You’re no John McCormack”. My God! What does she expect in Mayfield West? Caruso? I know I'm no Eileen Joyce, I’m so out of practice. But Father Thurlie was singing beautifully. Whatever got into her to stop him singing?

Breda: Are you sure you don’t know, Mary?

M ary: I can’t for the life of me work out why.

Unless she just likes throwing her weight around. And in my house! My God! The woman’s got a hide.

Breda: Mary, it’s Christy’s evening, not Father Thurlie’s.

M ary: What do you mean, Breda?

Breda: You’re paying too much attention to Thurlie O’Gorman.

M ary: But he’s the only one with a good singing voice. No one else can sing. Certainly not in the same class as Father O'Gorman.

Breda: Mary, is it just his singing voice that attracts you?

M ary (confused): What do you mean, Breda? (some clarity) Breda, what are you saying?

Breda: You know what I mean?

M ary: I do. I think I do know what you mean.

But no, Breda. No! Father’s a priest.

Breda: He’s also a man.

M ary: Yes but not an ordinary man, Breda.

Breda: An ordinary man, Mary. An ordinary, ordinary man.

M ary: You’re wrong Breda! Wrong! Wrong!

He’s a priest!

Breda: He’s a man, Mary. A rather charming one, I’ll give you that, but a man nevertheless.

And he’s ordinary in so far as he’s flesh and blood the same as any man. He’s got the same urges and desires of any man.

M ary: A priest is above all that, Breda. Those things don’t worry him. That’s why I hope Christy goes through with it. He won’t have to worry about all that dirt and filth. All the trouble that it brings.

Breda: No one can run away from life, Mary.

M ary: But you can run above life. A priest is above things. He’s a man of the spirit. Father Thurlie’s values are spiritual values.

Breda: Come off it, Mary. He’s not the bloody Holy Ghost!

M ary: Father O’Gorman has been my ideal of a priest ever since I first met him thirteen years ago. He’s everything a priest should be. It’s my great hope that Christy takes after him. Father O'Gorman is every inch my idea of a priest.

Breda: You’re romanticising him, Mary. He’s just a priest; not a bloody film star.

M ary (intrigued): He’d look well in a film. Just like Nelson Eddy.

Breda: Well, you’re no Jeannette McDonald, so stop kidding yourself.

M ary: I never said I was. (suddenly) Miss Siss is jealous, isn’t she? She’s jealous because Father Thurlie smiles at me more than at her. That’s why she stopped him singing. That's it. She’s jealous! (laughing) The old bag! Fancy! At her age!

M ary: But I didn’t think . . .

Breda: No, Mary. It isn't apparent to you. But it is to others. And quite possibly Miss Piss may not have liked Thurlie’s singing of her song. He’s certainly no John McCormack.

M ary: Breda, how can you say that? He’s got a glorious voice.

Breda: It’s a fair, passable voice, Mary. He might get on the Amateur Hour but no more.

M ary: Breda! How can you say that?

Breda: I’ve got ears on my head.

M ary: And you’re sticking up for Miss Siss. I didn’t think you'd do that. Not after what she’s done to you.

Breda: Mary, no one has more reason to dislike the woman than I have. But I’m trying to get you to see things as they are. I’m not sticking up for her. She may have a point, although I don’t like the way she makes it.

M ary: She’s got a hide. Coming into my home and throwing her weight around as though she owned the place.

Breda: She’s used to it, Mary. She did the same to me ten years ago.

M ary: You ought to take her up on that, Breda.

Breda: I think I’m in trouble enough already. I smoked a cigarette. (Pause.) Will you have the other half.

M ary: (hesitant): No. No thanks.

Breda: Do you feel up to joining the mob outside?

M ary: No, I’ll just sit here.

Breda: I think you should. Denny would want it.

M ary: All right. (Moves to go.) Will you come with me?

Breda: Christ no! The excitement would kill me. I’ll go out into the kitchen and be getting on with the dishes.

M ary: (at door): Thanks, Breda.

Breda leaves. Mary returns to the piano. Stays awhile, nervously determined to play. She then goes across and pours herself a whisky. She drinks it, showing little skill in the operation. She rturns to the piano and plays some notes tentatively. Tocky enters. Mary is aware that he is in the room and turns.

Tocky (almost menacing): Don’t let me disturb you. I just came in for a drop of whisky. Father O’Gorman’s keeping the other bottle to himself.

I suppose he’s trying to lubricate the vocal chords. He’s due to sing again in a few minutes.

Houses has nearly finished ‘Shamus O’Brien’.

And then Denny’s going to tell his little joke. It’s a wonderful little concert we’re having on the front verandah. No arguments. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for such a long time.

Pity Father has to sing without music. Still, he’ll manage. He did earlier. It’s a nice, cosy, comfy, little concert we’re having.

M ary: Get out!

Tocky: I see you’re having a private little concert all by yourself.

M ary: Get out!

Tocky: It’s getting to be a habit of yours telling people to get out.

M ary: Leave me alone!

Tocky: It’s a pity in a way that Father has to sing without any musical accompaniment. I suppose we could move the piano onto the front verandah. But, then again, I don’t suppose you’d let anyone touch your precious piano.

He deliberately puts his glass on top o f the piano.

M ary: Get your glass off my piano or I’ll throw it in your face!

Tocky (taking glass away): Easy now. Easy.

Temper! Temper! Ah, you’re sure a high and mighty one. You do give yourself airs and graces. Anyone would think you were a great concert pianist or something. You can’t play the piano! Father O’Gorman makes your fingers go all fluttery, doesn’t he?

M ary: Would you please go? You’re making me sick.

T o c ky (sneering): Your piano! You know, earlier tonight, Denny came begging to me for $5 to help with Christy. I told him his worries would come to an end if he sold his piano.

M ary: It’s not his to sell.

Tocky: That’s what he said and I told him he was a fool.

M ary: It’s my piano.

Tocky: I suppose selling it wouldn’t do any good. It would be wasted on Christy.

M ary: Wht do you mean?

Tocky: I don’t think he’ll make it.

M ary: Why? Tocky: Because he’s got you for a mother!

M ary: What’s wrong with me?

Tocky: When I stood next to Denny as his best

man when he married you, I didn’t think that he would have the gall six months later to ask me to b e ...

M ary (interrupting): Seven months later!

Christy was premature.

T ocky: Premature! Premature! Rubbish! You all say that! There’s no such thing! It’s just an excuse.

M ary: He was premature. He weighed only three pounds. Ask Denny.

Tocky: He was too ashamed to talk about it.

He knew why I refused to be Christy’s godfather. All I said to him was: “The woman tempted you and you fell”. He couldn’t look me in the eye. He just turned away in shame.

M ary: Did he ask you to be Christy’s godfather?

T ocky: Of course. Who else would he ask?

M ary: I told him not to ask you. And he did.

T ocky: And I refused.

M ary: I said to Denny: “I don’t want that little slug, Keating, to be godfather”. And off he goes and asks you and all he gets is a sermon. Well.

So that’s what’s got into you all these years.

Tocky: Denny and me were good friends until you came along. And he was a good living man too.

M ary: Oh my God! You’re twisted!

Tocky: Watch what you say. You’re the last one to start giving off at other people.

M ary: Get out! I feel like vomiting on you.

Tocky: Lovely! Lovely! That’s a nice way for a lady to talk.

M ary: Get out or you’ll hear worse in a moment.

T ocky: No doubt you could say worse too.

You’re just the type. I’ve always thought so.

M ary: Get to buggery out of here!

T ocky: What did I tell you? You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. But I know! I know! I’ve got you summed up.

He deliberately puts his glass on the piano.

M ary: Get that glass off my piano! Get that glass off my piano!

She takes the glass o ff the piano. In the ensuing struggle Mary spills drink over Tocky.

M ary: Get your effing hands off me, you slimy bugger!

They cease struggling. Complete silence. Both bewildered.

Tocky: What did you say?

M ary: You heard.

Tocky: You’re nothing but a foul-mouthed slut! You deserve to be beaten! You’re a dirty trollop.

Breda (entering): What’s going on? Mary?

M ary: I told him to get his effing hands off me.

Tocky: She threw drink all over me and then tried to hit me with the glass.

M ary: You bloody liar! It was an accident. He’s been at me all night. You’re a queer bastard, Keating.

Breda: You can say that again.

Tocky: It’s a wonder she’s got the hide to front the altar rails of a Sunday. With a mouth like hers. And the holy host resting on a tongue like hers.

M ary: He won’t believe Christy was premature.

Breda: Don’t worry, Mary. Some men aren’t happy unless a woman’s twelve month’s pregnant with her first child. Just to be on the safe side. Then no one can say they tickled the peter before marriage. It’s an awful dirty business, sex is. There’s only two types of women, aren’t there, Tocky? Virgins or whores.

If you’re not one, then you’re the other.

Tocky: I haven’t said anything like that.

Breda: Women! We’re just a source of temptation, aren’t we? Satan’s handmaidens!

But I bet you’ve got a few secret little habits of your own, haven’t you, Tocky?

O ’Gorman enters on this line, now showing effects o f drink and holding depleted bottle.

O ’G orm an: Secret habits? Who’s got secret habits?

Tocky: What do you mean?

Breda: Tocky. He plays with himself.

Tocky: I don’t do anything of the sort.

Breda: I bet you masturbate. Of course you do.

Anyway, you can easily tell a man who masturbates.

Tocky (uneasily): Ah, get out with you. Drop it.

Breda: He grows little black hairs in the palm of his left hand.

Tocky (quickly glancing at his left hand): I haven’t got a n y .. .

He realises he has been caught.

O ’G orm an: Don’t let it worry you, Tocky old cock. A few black hairs never hurt anyone.

Every cripple has to have his own way of walking.

Tocky: Look to yourself.

M ary (ignoring others, eagerly to O ’Gorman): Are you enjoying yourself?

O ’Gorm an (turning slightly guiltily to Mary): I sang beautifully. Beautifully. A lovely Irish tenor. . . I’m sorry. Tug-of-war. Pulled here, pulled there. (Swayingslightly) Never get steady.

Breda: The bottle won.

O ’Gorm an: Every cripple has to have his . . .(Looks up as he hears noises off.)

Breda: Hello. It must be near News time. Here comes the rest of the happy front-verandah crowd.

O ’Gorm an (aside, as Miss Siss enters, the others trooping behind): Old Miss Barley Water herself!

Miss Siss: We’ve had a very interesting little concert on the front verandah.

Breda (aside): We’ve had a pretty interesting little one here too.

Miss Siss: You should have stayed, Tocky.

Tocky: I had to come in. The smoke and the soot from the steelworks was interfering with my tubes.

Miss Siss: You missed Father singing ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’. He sang it beautifully.

Mrs O’Mahon, I’m sure you would have liked Houses’ rendition of ‘Shamus O'Brien’. And your husband told his joke about the murderer going to confession with great dash. And he added a very interesting touch to it tonight. Only Me Inside! I thought that was very funny. The joke improves with the telling. Wonderful THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

31

evening.

M ary: I’m pleased you enjoyed yourselves.

Denny: Are you feeling better now, Mary?

(She nods.) Where’s Christy?

M ary: He’s getting ready for bed. He’s going to come out in his dressing gown.

Denny: That’ll be lovely Mary! Lovely!

M ary: I’ll go out and get him.

Mary goes. O ’G orman hums O Little Town o f Mayfield West’.

Denny: You all right, Tocky?

Tocky: I’m all right.

O ’G orm an: Tocky’s been in the wars.

Houses: You’ll be soon knowing what the war holds for you, Tocky. The News should be on shortly. You never know, Tocky: you could be in line for a slouch hat.

Tocky: Oh my God! That would be the last thing I’d want. The Australian Army! Huh! Houses: What’s wrong with the Australian Army?

Tocky: It’s full of Australians.

Houses: And what’s wrong with Australians?

I’m an Australian!

Tocky: You’d never think so to hear the way you goon.

Houses: Well, I’m Irish-Australian. The finest type there is. What’s wrong with us?

Tocky: I can’t abide Australians. They’re arrogant. Full of their own importance. A fellow pulled me up the other day walking through the Open Hearth and he asked me with a sneer if I was a Pommy. I told him I was Irish. “That’s all right”, he said. “We don’t mind you Irish! It’s the Pommies we can’t stand”.

Houses: What’s wrong with that? I can’t stand Pommies myself.

Tocky: Talk about arrogance! “We” don’t mind you Irish! My God! Who did he think he was?

Houses: There’s no one more arrogant than your Pommy. The greatest, snootiest snobs you ever met. Have you heard the story of the English lord who spoke down to Joe Lyons. Joe Lyons, the greatest prime minister this country’s ever had, was over in London some years ago for some Empire conference. And this pompous, poofter Pommy lord, who hadn’t bothered to do his homework, said to Joe Lyons (imitating a fruity English voice): “I say, Lyons, old chap!

Are there many Catholics in Orstralya?” Joe said: “Yair. A few. A few”. “Well watch them Lyons, old chap. Watch them! They breed like rabbits!” And Joe Lyons was a tike: the father of ten kids!

Miss Siss: He used to call his family the Australian First Eleven! Joe Lyons was a great man. He’d be alive today only Bob Menzies stabbed him in the back!

O ’G orm an: Pig Iron Bob. Christy appears with Mary, dressed in red dressing gown, green pyjamas and black slippers.

The whole ensemble is most incongruously set o ff by a biretta on his head. Exclamations o f surprise and admiration when Christy appears.

Denny: He looks wonderful, Mary!

Miss Siss: My word he does look smart.

32

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Houses: He’s a fine young fellow. You should be proud of him Denny.

Denny: I am that! I am! We both are!

Miss Siss: He looks like a little priest already.

Houses: Come here to your grandfather, Christy. What’s this thing he’s wearing?

Denny: It’s a dressing gown.

Houses: I thought you only wore those things when you went to hospital!

Miss Siss: He does look smart. The dressing gown looks like a vestment. It’s like a chasuble or dalmatic.

Houses: It does too. He could almost say Mass this very minute.

Miss Siss: He’s just like a little priest.

O ’Gorm an (drunken slur): Just like a little priest!

Miss Siss: Cardinal Moran must have looked exactly the same a hundred years ago.

Denny: He might end up like Moran.

Miss Siss: Romanitas! Romanitas! Let’s hope he goes to Rome.

O ’Gorm an (singing): Be it ever so humbug, there’s no place like Rome.

Miss Siss (to Houses): I think Father’s had more than enough.

O ’G orm an (singing): Full in the panting heart of Rome, Beneath the Apostle’s crowning dom e...

Sorry! Sorry! It’s a hymn.

Miss Siss: Father’s got the Irish failing.

Houses: Thank God drunkenness is not a sin.

Miss Siss: But it can be embarrassing. And it’s not the best example in front of Christy.

Houses: It won’t affect Christy. Christy! We’ll see you crowned in Rome. You'll go one better than Moran. You’ll end up Australia’s first Pope.

Tocky: They haven’t made an Irishman Pope yet. What chance has an Australian got?

Miss Siss: It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. This new young Archbishop of Sydney. . . Gilroy. Well he could very likely become next Pope.

Tocky: Gilroy’s not even a cardinal. Mannix will be Australia’s next cardinal. What chance has Gilroy got of being Pope?

Miss Siss: I’m sure he'll be made a cardinal and then the prophecy of Nostradamus will have to be taken into account.

Tocky: Nostra what?

Miss Siss: Nostradamus. He’s prophesied that the next Pope will be “pastor et nauta”. That’s Latin for “shepherd and sailor”. Now Gilroy’s an excellent shepherd and coming from a country that’s full of sheep, the ‘shepherd’ is doubly significant. But what really clinches everything in his favour is the ‘sailor’ bit. There wouldn’t be too many sailors in the Sacred College of Cardinals. Now Gilroy has been a sailor. He was in the Royal Australian Navy. He fought at Gallipoli!

Tocky: I suppose he’ll call himself Pope Gallipoli the First.

Houses: That reminds me of a funny story about Mannix. Somebody told him that the next Pope would be an American for sure and

Mannix replied: “He’ll probably be called Pope Baloney the First”.

Miss Siss: All jokes aside. Archbiship Gilroy stands a very good chance. Such a smile and such a lovely speaking voice.

Tocky: An Australian! Pope! Australia’s nothing in the Church! It’s just a backwater!

Why, it hasn’t even got a saint of its own. It has to import its saints.

M ary: Hasn’t the cause of Mother Mary McKillop been taken to Rome?

Miss Siss: I believe it is going to be. But I've heard of another nun who may beat Mother Mary McKillop. I’ve heard a strong rumour that there's a nun somewhere in Australia who’s got the stigmata. It’s been kept very hush-hush for the moment. Won’t it be wonderful for Australia to have its own Theresa Neumann.

Houses: What are they keeping it quiet for?

O ’G orm an: Bloody nuns. They’re all stupid.

They get chilblains on their hands and they think they’ve got the stigmata. Nuns are bloody keystones, as Houses would say.

Houses: I wouldn’t call a nun a keystone. But at the same time I don’t think Australia’s first saint should be a woman.

Breda: Why not?

Houses: It wouldn't be fitting. Australia’s a man's country and Australia’s first saint should be a man. And we’ve got the right fellow here. A boy born and bred in this district whose cause for canonisation should have been taken to Rome ten years ago.

Miss Siss: Who’s that, Houses?

Houses: Les Darcy!

All (general incredulity, with exception o f Tocky) Les Darcy!

Houses: Yes, Les Darcy. It’s not as silly as it seems. Darcy led a saintly life. Father Coady over at Merewether will testify to the sanctity and purity of Darcy’s life. It wasn’t all just mass and communion with him.

Miss Siss: I believe you’re right, Houses. Les Darcy did live a saintly life. He never looked at a woman.

M ary: He did have a girl: Winnie O’Sullivan.

Myra Noblet (Cecilia McManus), Michael Madigan (Christy O’Mahon), Brian James (“Houses” O’Halloran) and Leslie Dayman (Denny O’Mahon).

Photographer: David Wilson

Miss Siss: He treated Winnie like a nun. He never looked at a woman with lust in his eyes.

Tocky: Who is this fellow, Darcy?

Houses: You’ll never make an Australian, Tocky.

Miss Siss: He was an Irish boy.

Houses: Poisoned by the Yanks.

Miss Siss: Born in Maitland, New South Wales; martyred in Memphis, Tennessee.

O ’Gorm an: Rubbish! He was crucified by his own countrymen. Crucified.

Tocky: But what was he? What did he do?

Houses: He was a prize fighter. The greatest ever. He would have been world champion, only the Yanks poisoned him.

Tocky: A prize fighter! A boxer! You don't seriously say he should be canonised?

Miss Siss: He never looked at a woman.

Breda (striking classic Darcy boxing pose): Should make an interesting statue next to some high altar. Boxing shorts and all.

Tocky: A boxer. Patron saint of Australia.

That’s the limit.

Houses: Well, at least he’s a native-born Australian. More than can be said for that French Carmelite nun over there on the wall: St Therese of Lisieux — the little Flower of Jesus.

Miss Siss: Darcy was the flower of the Hunter Valley.

Houses: He was the flower of Australian manhood. And not quite twenty-one when he died. Ah, I’ll never forget his funeral: the biggest the district’s ever seen.

Miss Siss: Ah, it was the grandest I ever attended. I’ll never forget seeing his embalmed body lying in the shop window in East Maitland, dressed in the habit of a Carmelite monk.

(Slowly, sibilant, making cheek-pinching motion in the air) His cheek felt so cold. So very cold.

The Com. Steel whistle blows. Cries o f “The N ew s” etc. Denny turns the volume up. The signature tune fo r the ABC News fo r the period is heard — ‘A dvance Australia Fair’— followed by the voice o f the newsreader.

N e w s re ad er: Here is the National News from the ABC read by Heath Burdock.

The situation in Singapore tonight appears both grim and confused. The BBC says: “Without thought for their own lives Allied troops are still trying desperately to stem the burning tide that threatens to submerge the island. The war is now on the outskirts of this shaken bastion of the Empire. The cruel, uneven fight goes on. But there is no talk of surrender”.

A t this point Christy rises and very formally and slowly, with biretta on head, walks to the right side o f the darkened apron o f the stage and takes up a position facing left.

N e w s re ad er: Tokyo Radio reports that Australian troops are fiercely resisting around the reservoirs near Pasor Panjang, about seven miles from the centre of Singapore.

Rome Radio reports that casualties are heavy.

(Miss Siss rises.) “Every inch of the northern part of the city is being disputed,” the report says. “It is simply hell on earth. The British, Australian, Chinese and Indian troops on the

outskirts of Singapore are fighting with incredible contempt for death.”

Bells now begin to ring. The bells keep tolling throughout the death scenes until the resumption o f the News.

Miss Siss: Death! I outlived them all! Four I outlived physically, one mentally and one spiritually.

She walks to the left side o f the apron, in line with and opposite Christy.

C hristy: The death of Thomas Oliver Keating:

New Guinea, December 1942.

Tocky moves to the apron o f the stage, next to Miss Siss.

Miss Siss: On the seventh of June 1942, Japanese submarines shelled the city of Newcastle. Tocky, true to the solemn vow which he had made in the O’Mahon home on the night of the thirteenth of February 1942, joined the Australian Army. He was posted to New Guinea.

Tocky did not fall in battle. He died from dysentery. (Tocky stiffly begins to kneel.) But he led a clean, wholesome life and we may be sure he died in the colour of sanctity.

Miss Siss pinches the cheek o f the now kneeling Tocky.

C hristy: The death by drowning of Breda Mulcahy: Stockton Beach, January 1948.

Breda moves to the apron and stands next to Tocky.

Miss Siss: Breda Mulcahy was drowned on a Sunday morning at Stockton. She had not been to Mass that morning. She was carried out to sea with her lover, both of whom were swimming in the nude. His swollen body was washed up on the beach some days later. Hers was never found.

M ary: Breda came no more to land.

Miss Siss: Damned! Damned! Damned!

O ’G orm an: Twixt the stirrup and the ground.

Twixt the stirrup and the ground.

Miss Siss: Damned! Damned! Damned!

O ’G orm an: 'Twixt the stirrup and the ground.

Twixt the stirrup and the ground.

M ary: Farewell Breda! Farewell, most lovely of Irishwomen, most generous-hearted, most beautiful of humans. Breda! Star of the Sea! Miss Siss pinches the cheek o f the kneeling Breda.

C h risty: The ‘death’ by spiritual drowning of Thurlogh John O’Gorman: Newcastle, June 1949.

O ’Gorman walks to the apron o f the stage and stands next to Breda.

Miss Siss: His was the worst death of all because he suffered eternal damnation. He was spiritually drowned. Better a millstone had been tied around his neck and he had been cast into the depths of the sea. He committed an act of impurity with a Child of Mary.

O ’Gorman remains standing. He refuses the pinch on the cheek.

Miss Siss: Damned! Doubly damned! Better they had both been drowned in the depths of the sea.

C h risty: The death by burning of my father, Dennis Patrick O’Mahon: Newcastle

Steelworks, September 1953.

Miss Siss: He always thought he would outlive me. He hoped I would leave him a little something in my will. “He who makes a spinster laugh”. Hah! It was me who had the last laugh.

Denny was killed in the Ferro-Alloy Mill of the BHP. He was tapping a chrome furnace when he was showered with molten chrome and incinerated.

Chrome is a cranky metal. It shot out all over him in a great, gushing spurt. When they came to bury him there was more chrome in the coffin than on it. Poor fellow! He didn’t have much to live for.

Denny who has come to the apron, kneels. Miss Siss pinches his cheek.

C hristy: The ‘death’ by mental burning of my mother, Mary O’Mahon: Morriset, September 1953.

Miss Siss: At Denny’s death poor Mary went mad and had to be locked away. The good nuns in the Catholic Hospice did the best they could wilh her. But the poor thing was well gone. She had always lacked stability. It’s a pity she ever saw herself as the mother of a priest. If God gives vocations to priests. He also gives vocations to the mothers of priests. And poor, silly Mary was never truly called, except to the madhouse.

M ary (walking towards the apron, searchingfo r her syllogism): God the F ath er... God the Son.. (shrieking her moment o f illumination) Then God the Holy Ghost must be a woman. God The Father! God the Son! (yelling) Then God the Holy Ghost is a woman! God the Holy Ghost is a woman!

(She reaches the apron, next to Denny) I want to have a baby! I want to have a special baby. I want to have the baby Jesus! God the Holy Ghost is a woman, is a woman, is a woman, a woman, a woman, a woman...

Mary refuses the pinch on the cheek. She remains standing.

C h risty: The death by cardiac arrest of my grandfather, Vincent de Paul O’Halloran: Newcastle, March 1970.

Houses moves to the apron. Miss Siss, now visibly aging in gait and voice, approaches him.

Miss Siss: Houses was eighty-three years of age when he died in March 1970. He died from a heart attack in the saloon bar of a certain Newcastle Hotel after being told a ribald story. He died laughing. He died laughing without the benefits of the sacraments.

Houses kneels. Miss Siss bestows the pinch on the cheek.

C h risty: The death of Cecilia Claire McManus of natural causes: Newcastle, December 1970.

Miss Siss totters to her place in the line, next to Houses. She kneels with great difficulty.

C hristy: Miss Siss died nine months after my grandfather. She was ninety-nine years of age.

She left all her money to the Passionist Fathers at the Shrine of Perpetual Adoration in Chicago, for masses to be said for her soul for the next three hundred and fifty years. She left it to the Americans because they gave her the best value THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

33

for her money.

The seven dead (who have been silently

telling their beads, become more audible): Have mercy upon us, now and at the hour o f our death. (Ad lib and not in unison.)

Fade to brown-out and the continuation o f the News.

All back in places as formerly, lights up.

N e w s re ad er: However at 2 a.m. today a dramatic message was heard coming from the garrison on Singapore over Singapore Radio after its transmitter had been silent for twentyfour hours. It said: “We are not only going to fight — we are going to win. We shall emerge from the struggle”.

Pause.

Meanwhile, it was announced in Canberra this evening that the federal government had assumed total powers under the National Security Act to place any part of Australia under martial law in the event of an emergency.

Mr Forde, the Minister for the Army, said that martial law would apply immediately to any part of Australia invaded by the enemy.

Houses (jumping up and turning wireless off): My God! Did you hear that? “Martial law”! “If any part of Australia is invaded”. That doesn’t sound too good.

Miss Siss: Are we going to be invaded?

Houses: Well, they’re talking about it.

“Martial law”. Tocky, you mightn’t be the only one conscripted. We might all end up with a rifle in our hands.

Tocky: Ah. They’re making a big mouthful about nothing. You heard. “Singapore hasn’t fallen”.

Miss Siss: That’s right, Houses. Singapore hasn’t fallen. You heard what they said: “We are not only going to fight, we are going to win. We shall emerge from the struggle”.

Houses: That sounds like bloody Churchill.

(Imitating Churchill) “We are not only going to fight — on the beaches — but we are going to win” Blah. Blah. Blah. All talk. Singapore’s as good as gone.

Miss Siss: Things are serious then, Houses?

Houses: Dead serious, Miss Siss. Desperate.

Singapore’s as good as down the drain. And we’re next on the list. We’re on our Pat Malone.

Britain’s no help.

Breda: Hasn’t John Curtin asked the Ameri­ cans for help?

Houses: Curtin! Curtin’s a keystone. He was probably drunk when he got in touch with the Yanks.

O ’G orm an: John Curtin hasn’t touched a drop in years. Here’s to John Curtin — a great Australian.

Houses: Great Australian, all right. It was Curtin and his mob who thought up the Brisbane Line. What a keystone of an idea. Give half Australia away without putting up a fight.

Breda: Bullshit, Houses. Curtin and the Labor Party had nothing to do with the Brisbane Line.

It was your mob who thought that one up, Houses.

Houses: Well, I suppose it does allow for 34 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

concentration of forces. You have to make a stand somewhere.

Breda: Christ, you change your tune.

Miss Siss: Could you moderate your language, Miss Mulcahy. You just took the holy name in vain, to say nothing of the rude word you used a moment ago.

Breda: Bullshit! I'll moderate my language when Houses moderates his one-eyed views.

Houses: Well all I'm saying, come to think of it, is that the southern halFs more important than the top half. There’s only a lot of Abos running around up there. It’s the east coast that’s important. Newcastle, for instance.

Tocky: Newcastle! Newcastle’s a dump.

Houses: Newcastle might be a dump, Tocky, but it’s an important dump. As far as this war’s concerned, Newcastle’s strategically a prime target. Look at all the heavy industries: Rylands, Lysaghts, the Com. Steel, the state dockyard, the BHP itself. They could all go.

Miss Siss: The BHP? What would happen to my shares, Houses?

Houses: They’ll be worthless. You can paper your dunny with them.

Miss Siss: Sweet Jesus! I think you should join up, Tocky.

Houses: We might all have to join up. Martialbloody-law!

Miss Siss: Nothing would happen to you, Tocky. Sure you’d be wearing Our Lady’s scapulars and I would give you a St Christopher medal and a medal of Our Lady Help of Christians.

O ’Gorm an: And I’ll give you a medal of St Jude: the patron saint of the Impossible.

Tocky: The hope of the hopeless. You’re both very generous. I’ll be wearing more medals going into battle than most soldiers have coming out.

Denny: It’s not a bad life, the army. No worries.

Tocky: Not you too, Denny.

Miss Siss: It’s a great calling. A wonderful vocation.

Houses: It will be like going on a crusade.

Tocky: Will you let me live my own life. In my own way. O.K. O.K.! If Newcastle ever gets attacked I’ll consider joining up. But it will be my decision and no one else’s.

Houses: That’s a promise?

Tocky: You can take it as a vow. But I don’t think I’ll ever be called on to honour it.

Miss Siss: God bless you, Tocky. If need be, I’ll light a candle for you every day.

Breda: Our Lady’s little Digger!

Tocky: Stop pestering me. Leave me be.

Pause.

Miss Siss (getting up): Well. That’s been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. (Coyly to Mary) Oh. . .Mrs O’Mahon. . .Could you. show me the rest of the house?

She departs with Mary.

O ’G orm an: She’s gone to light a candle for you, Tocky.

Houses laughs, yawns and nods o ff O ’Gorm an (advancing drunkenly on Breda): In Newcastle’s fair city, where the girls are so

pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Breda Mulcahy. Breda! Breda!

Breda: Thurlie darling, you’re getting pissed.

O ’G orm an: Breda! I have something serious to say to you. I want to hear your Confession.

Breda: Gawd! You are pissed!

O ’G orm an: You must let me hear your confession.

Breda (laughing): I’d keep you up all night, I have so many sins to confess.

O ’G orm an: I’d gladly stay up all night for you, Breda.

Breda: I bet you would stay up too — all night.

Thurlie, can I tell you a secret?

O ’G orm an: Do, Breda. Do. Breda: Thurlie, I’ve never slept with a priest.

O ’G orm an: Breda, it’s not your body I’m interested in. It’s your soul.

Breda: Is there any difference in a woman’s body and her soul?

O ’G orm an: I’d hate you to be switched into eternity without the benefit of the sacrament.

Breda: Thurlie, if you ever hear of me being switched into eternity, think of the old saying: ‘Twixt the stirrup and the ground, she redemption sought and found’.

O ’G orm an: ‘Twixt the stirrup and the ground.. . ’ It doesn’t give you much time, Breda.

Breda: It’s an eternity of time. It’s all I’ll need.

(They gaze at each other in amicable unison.)

Watch the whisky, Thurlie.

O ’G orm an: I’m celebrating my coming of age.

They say a Catholic priest should never touch whisky until he’s forty. I’ve just turned forty.

Breda: Well, watch it. It’s a bad age for a man.

Thunderclap which wakens Christy.

Denny: I think it’s going to rain. (He exits.)

Breda crosses to Christy.

C h risty: Hello, Breda.

Breda: Hello, Christy love. Here. I said I had something for you. Don’t let Tocky see it. He’ll have a heart attack.

She hands Christy a pair o f rosary beads.

C h risty : Rosary beads! Thanks, Breda! I didn’t think...

Breda: I know. You needn’t say anything. (She

Kevin Miles as Father O’Gorman in A Happy and Holy Occasion by John O’Donoghue.

Photographer: David Wilson

smiles.) You didn’t expect that, did you?

C hristy: No, I didn’t.

Breda: You'll have to get them blessed.

C hristy: I’ll get Father Thurlie to bless them.

Breda: You'd better not. I don’t think Thurlie can tell one hand from the other.

C h risty: They’re beautiful beads. They’re real strong.

Breda: They’re Irish horn. (She laughs.) Irish horn! (She sees Christy blush and realises that he sees the play on words.) Ah. Little boy knows more than his prayers. Irish born. Ah, wicked Breda has made him blush. (He begins to laugh.)

Ah, that’s better. Ah, my little boy. My innocent little boy. I spend all my life figuring ways to stop having babies but I’d love you for my son.

Denny enters from the verandah.

Denny: Breda, I think it’s time we all said goodnight to Christy. He’s got a big day ahead of him.

C h risty: Thanks, Breda. Thanks for everything: the pound note an d .. .the Irish horn. . .rosary beads.

Houses: Let’s drink a night-cap to Christy.

And let’s talk politics also.

O ’G orm an: Politics! What are you on about man?

Houses: If he’s old enough to begin his studies for the priesthood, he’s old enough to begin his study of politics.

O ’G orm an: For God’s sake, let the lad be. Let him off to bed.

Houses: We haven’t drunk to him yet.

Miss Siss returns.

Breda: Let Christy go! Drink to him?

Denny: Breda, Miss Siss has returned. I think we should all farewell Christy with a drink and a prayer.

Breda (to Christy): Go on, love. Help your dad with the drinks.

Houses: I only wanted to whisper in his ear: to put him right politics-wise. We need the clergy to set an example in politics. It should worry you, Father, the way things are going. Scullin dead: a great Catholic. Lyons is dead. And he had to cross the floor of the House. What have we got in the Labor Party? Curtin?

Miss Siss: Hasn't darkened a church door in years.

Houses: Chifley?

Miss Siss: The same. Hasn’t darkened a church door in years.

Houses: Both bad Catholics. No wonder the Labor Party is riddled with left-wing elements.

Socialists and communists! What Australia needs is a party of principles, a true Labor Party.

O ’G orm an: What are you going to call your Party: the RWRC’s — Right-Wing Roman Catholics.

Houses: There’s no sense in bringing religion openly into politics. We could call it the TLP: the True Labor Party. That sounds good: TLP. Miss Siss: Why don’t you call it the People’s Labor Party?

Houses: PLP? Yes. That would go. I suppose you can get a lot of combinations.

Breda: Why don’t you call it the Catholic

United National Tory Socialists.

Houses (intrigued): Catholic United National Tory Socialists! That’s a mouthful! How do the initials go? C — U — N — Miss Siss (shrieking): Don’t say it, Houses!

Don’t say it. She’s trying to put it in your mouth.

Houses (realizing the acronym): Oh my God! Thanks, Miss Siss.

Miss Siss: Christopher O’Mahon go to bed!

Poor boy, you’ve heard enough for one night.

Go! Go! C h risty: Goodnight.

Christy departs. Miss Siss advances on a laughing Breda.

Breda: I’m sorry. I didn’t think you had one.

Miss Siss: Your mouth needs washing with Lysol. You need a scrubbing brush and sandsoap to your tongue.

Mary enters.

Denny: I’m sure Breda didn’t mean anything, Miss Siss. I’m sure it just slipped out.

Miss Siss: Just slipped out! I’d hate to hear what she’d say when she’s really trying. Mr O'Mahon, I’m surprised that you’ve invited a woman like this one to your home tonight. Just who is she?

Denny: Breda’s an old friend of the family.

Miss Siss: How come you have a friend like her? I really don’t think she goes to Mass. Am I right? You’re a bad Catholic, aren’t you?

Breda: You’re right. I haven’t darkened a church door in years.

Denny: Breda!

Breda: The last time I attended Mass was a certain Sunday in 1932. It was in the height of the Depression. The Easter Dues were being read out. Remember! Most of the people in that congregation found it hard to scrape together five shillings to give as their donation. You gave twenty guineas! Even the poor old statues got a shock. And you were up the front, preening yourself like a great pharisee!

Miss Siss: Pharisee! What are you talking about? I’ve always given generously to the Church. I love the Catholic Church.

Breda: You are the Church! You love yourself, you dried-out withered old harridan.

Denny: Breda!

Miss Siss: Mr O’Mahon, I did not come here to be insulted.

Breda: The day after you had given so magnanimously to the Church you evicted me from my home in Crebert Street.

Denny: Breda! Breda! It’s all past.

Breda: Do you remember a Mrs Breda Casey?

Miss Siss: Breda Casey! So that’s who you are! Now 1 remember. You were behind in your rent.

Breda: Only six bloody weeks.

Miss Siss: And where’s your husband?

Breda: God knows. He went looking for work soon after and hasn’t come back. I divorced him four years ago.

Miss Siss: You’re divorced!

Breda: Yep. And I don’t work at Scotts. I’m a barmaid at the Bottom Pub in Waratah.

Miss Siss: Oh, sweet Jesus! A divorced

woman! Barmaid at the Bottom Pub in Waratah. How low can a Catholic woman sink!

Mr O’Mahon! I’m disappointed! I thought this was to be a happy and holy occasion! It has turned into a farce! You and your wife are deluding yourselves. This does not augur well for the future! I think you know what I mean. I frankly don’t think you are fit parents for a priest. I’m afraid I must leave. Mrs O’Mahon, my bag and missal.

Denny: I’m sure Breda doesn’t bear you any grudge, Miss Siss.

Miss Siss: It’s not a point about her bearing me a grudge. I’m the one from whom forgiveness is required. But I am not a vindictive woman. (To Breda.) I shall go over to the monastery in the morning. Thank you, Mrs O’Mahon. I shall light a candle for you, Mrs Casey.

Breda: You know what you can do with your bloody candle.

Miss Siss: That’s it. I shall hear no more.

Good evening! Mr and Mrs O’Mahon 1 think you should reconsider your aspirations with regard to your eldest son. The signs are not auspicious! Mark my words! Goodnight to you all!

She leaves.

Denny: Saints in heaven. It couldn’t have been worse.

Houses: There goes your $500. You can kiss that goodbye.

O ’G orm an: You were grand, Breda. Grand.

Denny: I wish you hadn’t been so forthright, Breda. For Christy’s sake.

Breda: Denny, you’ve got your picture of Cardinal Moran. That’s all Christy’s going to get. You’ve lost nothing.

Denny: You certainly waded into her.

Breda: She wasn’t too backward on the way out herself.

It starts to rain.

Denny: I wish she hadn’t said that.

M ary: Yes! It was a curse! About the future.

For Christy. The signs are not auspicious. The signs do not augur well for the future. The signs!

The signs!

O ’G orm an: Come, Mary, come! Let me show you an auspicious sign. Give me your hand, Mary. You can always tell the hand of a priest’s mother. That’s right! Look. See here. You have the letters I H S in the palm of your left hand.

They say that the mother of every priest has those letters. It’s an infallible sign. They stand for ‘Iesus Hominum Salvator’ — ‘Jesus Saviour of Men’.

M ary: You’re right! You’re right! I have the sign! I have the mark. I have the letters I H S. Breda: Oh, sweet Jesus! What are you up to, Thurlie?

O ’Gorm an (Hand fondling): Yes. Yes. You have the mark! You have the mark! The same as my mother! Better in fact. The letters are clearer, better formed, more clearly etched.

Better than my mother. My mother cheated! She gouged the ‘S’ out with a razor blade! She cheated!

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

35

M ary (now almost trance-like, her hand still held by O'Gorman): But I have another sign too.

Remember when I was carrying Christy and you paid a family visitation? I was playing the piano and you were sitting here on the lounge. And Christy jumped in my womb. And when I lay on the lounge you blessed Christy in my womb; you made the sign of the cross on my bare flesh. I felt the power of the Holy Ghost entering me. I knew then that I was carrying a son and that he would be a priest.

O ’G orman’s hand is dropped. Mary begins to chant from the Proper o f the Mass fo r the Annunciation, part o f the Reading from Isaih the Prophet.

M ary: Hear ye, therefore, O House of David: The Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel. He shall eat butter and honey, that he may know to refuse the evil, and to choose the good.

(Yelling) To hell with Miss Siss. To hell with her curse! I have my signs! I have my signs! And they shall not be taken from me! And they shall not be taken from me!

A ll stare at Mary. Houses goes across and pulls O ’Gorman to the door.

Houses: Come on, Father. Let’s go. You've done enough damage for one night.

O ’G orm an: Benedictio te omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sanctis.

He is jostled out o f the door by Houses. Mary does not see them go. Breda gets up and goes across to Mary.

Breda (gently shaking Mary): Mary! Mary!

M ary (coming out o f trance): What is it, Breda?

Breda (leading Mary to chair): Sit down, Mary.

Just relax a moment. I’m going to make you a glass of warm milk. And then I’ll put you to bed.

All right?

M ary: All right, Breda.

Breda goes. Long pause.

Denny: Why did you let O’Gorman touch you?

Why did you let him bless you on your naked belly?

M ary: I wanted a proper blessing. I wanted him to get as close to my unborn child as possible.

Denny: And you took your clothes off?

M ary: No! No! I simply lifted my dress and lowered my bloomers — just enough to let him bestow a large blessing on my baby — a large sign of the cross.

Denny: How could you let a man do that to you?

M ary: A man? He’s not a man! He’s a priest!

Denny: He’s a man, and a randy one at that!

He had no right to touch you.

M ary: No right to touch me! What are you talking about? If a doctor can touch me when I’m pregnant, why can’t a priest?

Denny: You stupid, blind woman! What gets into you? Priests don’t go round touching up women, pregnant or not. What is there between you and O’Gorman? What’s been going on all night? You’ve been mooning away at him as though he’s Errol Flynn. You want his shoes under your bed, don’t you?

36 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

M ary: He’s a Priest! A Priest! He’s above all

brew.

that!

Tocky: She deserved it!

Denny: I suppose she did.

T o c k y : You’re not angry with me are you?

Denny: No, Tocky. No. I’m not angry with

Denny: He’s a randy farmer’s son. I H S!

You’ve no more got those letters on your hand than you’ve got them on your arse.

M ary: I have the letters! I have the sign!

Denny (grabbing her hand and scrutinising the palm): The only letter you have is the letter ‘M’.

‘M’for moll.

M ary: No! Mother! Mary!

Denny: O my sweet Jesus, what have you done? You’ve brought filth and dirt into this house. You destroy everything for me. Look!

I’m only a common labourer — a pitman in a furnace and I’ll be that till the day I die. But I didn’t want that for my boy. I want something better. And you drag him down!

T ocky: And six months from the altar. Have you forgotten that?

M ary: You keep out of this, you slimy bugger!

Denny: You destroy everything for me! Just listen to the way you speak! How can Christy be a pure priest with a mother like you?

M ary: What have I done? All I wanted was a blessing on my unborn babe. Nothing else.

T ocky: You did! You wanted more!

M ary: I swear before God all I wanted was a consecrated hand on my belly!

Denny rips a long, loping fist low and deep into her abdomen. Mary falls to her knees groaning.

Denny backs off.

Denny: There’s a blessing on your belly. (He gulps a whisky.)

T ocky: Get up! Get up! You're only shamming! Get up! You haven’t had all that's coming to you. Get up!

He roughly pulls Mary to her feet. Mary pushes him off.

M ary: Get your fucking hands off me!

T ocky: What did you say?

M ary: You heard me.

Tocky: I did too. Take that.

Tocky coldly and methodically proceeds to belt her. She falls to the floor. Tocky, breathing heavily, moves away from her. Mary cries out.

Breda enters with a glass o f milk.

Breda: Mary? What happened?

Tocky: She’s all right.

M ary: He hit me.

Breda: What?

M ary: He belted me.

T ocky: She deserved it.

Breda: Denny? (Denny looks away. Breda turns to Tocky.) Did you enjoy it, Tocky? Did it give you a great thrill? Better than an oldfashion naughty. You’re still a virgin.

Tocky: She deserved it.

Breda: You shit! You twisted. . .Come, love, I’ll take you to bed. I don’t understand you, Denny.

Denny: I lost control of myself. I’m sorry.

Breda: I just don't understand you. I’ll look after you, Mary. I'll stay the night. You two can stay out here. You deserve each other.

Breda leads Mary out.

T ocky: Let me have another whisky.

Denny: Finished. Here, have some of my home

you.

T ocky: She deserved it. Say she deserved it.

Denny: She deserved it.

T ocky: Thanks, Denny. Thanks. Here. Here.

Here's what you've been after all night.

Denny: Five pounds Tocky! Five pounds!

That’s wonderful! I knew you wouldn’t let me down. You’re a grand little scout!

T ocky: Things will be the same?

Denny: Thanks a lot, Tocky. Things will be the same.

T ocky: Denny! I can’t taste the kerosine.

Denny: I told you the taste would go away.

T ocky: I can’t taste the kerosine.

Denny: It’s raining hard.

T ocky: Forget the rain. Forget the rain. It’s nice and cosy in here.

Denny: Nice and cosy.

T ocky: No women to disturb us.

Denny: No women to disturb us.

T ocky: Singapore won’t fall, will it Denny?

Denny: No, Tocky. Singapore won’t fall.

T ocky: I won’t have to go away and fight.

Denny: You won’t have to go away and fight.

T ocky: Singapore won’t fall. (He falls against the piano and slides to the floor where he lies prone. Bloody piano.

Denny: Are you all right, Tocky?

Tocky: I'm all right, Denny. Let me be. I just want to rest. Singapore won't fall.

Denny: Rest, Tocky, rest. I'll lie down here on the sofa. (He turns the light off.) Goodnight, Tocky. Pleasant dreams. (No answer from Tocky.) The little sod’s gone to sleep.

Denny falls asleep on the sofa. Noise o f heavy rain. Christy, in crumpled pyjamas enters. Long pause. He stands surveying the scene. Then Breda joins him.

C h risty : W hat’s happened Breda? What’s wrong?

Barbara West (Mary O’Mahon) and Leslie Dayman (Denny O’Mahon).

Photographer: David Wilson

Breda: Nothing’s wrong, little man. Nothing’s

wrong!

C h risty (pointing to Tocky and Denny): I don’t

understand!

Breda: You will one day. You’re only a little boy.

Long, mournful Com. Steel whistle.

C h risty: What whistle’s that?

Breda: Dogwatch.

C h risty: Dogwatch! It’s midnight! I’ve never been up so late. I heard the noise — and the rain.

I can’t sleep.

Breda: Come with me, Christy. Let’s start a new day together. I’ll lie with you.

C h risty: You’ll sleep with me?

Breda: Yes, darling. Breda will sleep with you.

And we’ll say the rosary together. That’s a great way of falling asleep. Better than counting sheep. Have you got the rosary beads I gave you.

C h risty: Yes, Breda. I’ve got them here.

Breda: Well come, little man. Let’s go to bed and say the rosary. The Sorrowful Mysteries if I can still remember them. Yes. I think I can: The Agony in the Garden, The Scourging at the

Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion.

(Pause.) Come on Christy love.

They walk o ff stage together, Breda holding Christy closely.

THE D A N C E C O M P A N Y IN A S S O C IA T IO N WITH THE M L C THEATRE

STAGING CONSULTANTS

□

ROYAL C O M P A N Y PRESENT

49 DARLINGHURST ROAD, KINGS CROSS.

Staging Consultants’ shows currently in production

THE C A S S ID Y ALBUM

by Peter Kenna

Produced by the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust

• A HARD GOD • F U R T IV E LOVE •A N EAGER HOPE a trilogy direct from the Adelaide Festival Arts, currently playing at the York Theatre, Seymour Centre.

• Set design and construction, wardrobe, props, lighting design, sound, total production co­ ordination and staffing.

TH E 2 0 ’s AND ALL TH A T JA Z Z produced by the Arts Council of N.S.W. currently touring N.S.W. • Set construction and painting, props, lighting, sound effects and staffing.

We can design, build and paint sets in our own fully equipped workshops, mount entire productions, locate a single prop or costume.

GET YO U R AC T TO G ETH ER

3 5 7 -1 0 5 7

A DANCE-THEATRE EXPERIENCE C H O R E O G R A P H Y A N D P R O D U C T IO N

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M U S IC

GRAEME MURPHY

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37

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Ballet

William Shoubridge

A moment of light and joy to relieve the general, all-encompassing gloom.

The news that almost a dozen dancers from the Australian Ballet have left the company to seek greener pastures in Europe and the United States, would apparently set a grim tone to the future of the Company; this year at least. The fact that the majority of the dancers are established stars and principals makes the problem worse, there are too few reliable talents left to replace them. It was of course on the books that such action would be taken once Anne Woolliams had finally left the Company.

Some of the dancers left out of sympathy with her, others left because they are fed up with the constricting climate and artistic repression within the Company, brought about mainly by the interference of a conservative, box-office obsessed administration. But I’ve gone over all of that before, and to say it again would be just repititious.

The quality of the Company has fallen, as has its image in the eye of the public, at least the public that knows about dance and what it can be. Many members of the Press openly snigger about the Company and give it condescending, scant or non-existent notice in the papers. With matters the way they are, with the power pyramid still intact, things are going to get worse before they are going to get better.

But at least last year, there was a moment of light and joy to relieve the general, allencompassing gloom, Anne Woolliams' remounting of the Petipa Ivanov classic Swan Lake. There were of course the usual voices raised (mainly by those who know nothing about dance) questioning why the Australian Ballet should be doing Swan Lake anyway, it seemed to them to be nothing but an old cliched war horse.

The simple answer to all that is that the Company did it because, like Everest, it is there.

A classical ballet company without a Swan Lake is like an opera company without Verdi or Puccini or a theatre company without Shakespeare; Swan Lake is the central well spring of classical ballet. One of the great strengths of the work is that it is the greatest dramatic ballet in the repertoire, acceptable dancing is not enough to get a performer through. It demands convincing acting ability as well. It stretches a dancer, in all aspects of his or her art, not only the principals, but the corps de ballet in general and the female dancers in particular.

Unlike opera, the nineteenth century classics that can be still effectively produced can be counted on one hand. Ballet in the nineteenth

century (mainly French) fell into disrepute, treated as a pleasant after dinner entertainment at best and a glorified tit and bum show for the Paris Opera Jockey club at worst.

Petipa and Ivanov were the point of departure for all of the Diaghilev choreographers, Fokine, Massine, Nijinsky, Nijinska and Balanchine.

Swan Lake once there was a staging that was equal to the power and depth of the music, became the sine-qua-non of classic ballet.

Mention ballet to the man in the street and he will nearly always think of Swan Lake. It is just this familiarity that can so easily make the work a cliche when improperly handled.

It is Anne Woolliams’ great triumph, in conjunction with John Lanchberry (arranger and conductor) and Tom Lingwood (set and costume designer) that the work makes an overall impact, it works together cohesively. The old production of the Company, the one that Fonteyn and Nureyev danced in, was serviceable enough, but the mood and atmosphere was pasted on top of the dancing, the sense of period was hardly ever there. It had no image. Lingwood and Woolliams have set this new production firmly in medieval Germany; dark, forbidding and mysterious; the sort of setting where you can believe in evil barons holding young maidens in thrall under a spell; where you accept young princes dying to escape the suffocating panoply of court ritual and arranged marriages.

But one of the greatest beauties of the new production is that there is a feeling that it belongs to the Australian Ballet, almost as if the work had been newly created on them. There are parts in it that were specifically fashioned for certain dancers within the Company, and therefore it is a work that will grow and expand and deepen in interpretation as the Company continues to perform it.

Woolliams, following recent precedent has welded together Acts I and II ensuring the greatest contrast between the encrusted regalia of court mannerism and the free, wind blown beauty of the first lakeside encounter.

It must be mentioned here that one of the most successful innovations of the production is the palpable and real role played by the lake itself. As designed by Lingwood it is a continuous presence, lit so that it broods and seethes through out the story and in the final scene shimmers in release and freedom, it is the dramatic eye of the storm for the whole ballet.

Lanchberry too has done masterly

reassessment of the score, especially in the final scene as Odette and Siegfried dance their final pas de deux in a totally bare stage. He has kept the mood dark and elegaic by using an interpolation from Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet instead of the rather rum-te-tum music usually used and Woolliams has rechoreographed this scene also keeping the mood and emotion interior and heart-breaking; no grand Bolshoi lifts or phoney flailing of arms to approximate unconsummated love and passion.

There are faults in the work of course, and something should be done about them. Act I is far too busy with ambassadors, cavaliers, knights and pages wandering about with a lack of purpose and position. The scene for the male corps at the end of the act as they entice Siegfried to go hunting with them is sloppy, fussy and atrociously danced. The latter fault could be due to the lack of rehearsal time for the male corps, after all Swan Lake is still an essentially female dominated ballet. The men will probably get their chance to shine in Spartacus later this year.

But the merits of the production far outweigh the debits.

Woolliams has wisely kept the Ivanov choreography for Act II, it would be silly to do otherwise, apart from being a sacrilege, because one would have to be a world famous master choreographer to come up with something just as expressive and poetic, or else do a complete overhaul on the whole ballet, like John Neumier's staging for the Hamburg ballet, which turned the whole thing into a dream fantasy of mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

But Woolliams and her co-choreographer Ray Powell have done marvels with Act IV. The scene fairly drips with remorse, regret and impending tragedy from the very raising of the curtain. The deep intakes of breath and applause from the audience were well deserved. The only shape on the stage at the beginning of the act is that of a huge wing shape of prone swans on the stage floor arching back in solemn despair and regrouping in quick flights like trapped birds winging from one side of a cage to another; a succint and beautiful image. But of course, nothing in Swan Lake, either the dancing or the drama would be what it is without the principal roles, Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried.

In terms of a partnership the first night team of Ross Stretton and Michaela Kirkaldie was the best. Although flung into the part at short notice they worked so well in collaboration that I’m THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

39

sure they’ll be paired off together in a lot of performances and not only of Swan Lake. They weren’t quite so convincing in the star parts of The Merry Widow again perhaps for lack of preparation but in Swan Lake, they were excellent. Kirkaldie had the right manner and the deep haunting face that suited her interpretation, that of the Swan Queen being essentially a chimera, a vision, an idealisation of the Prince’s fancy. Her dancing, especially in the Act II pas de deux was fluid without being droopy, dramatic without being grandiloquent and just so gently poised as to retain enough of a vestige of humanity to make the love scene real.

Ross Stretton, a strong and positive partner, acted the part as Siegfried, making him no idle Hamletesque dreamer but a forthright male who knew his own mind; very Byronic.

The later partnership of Gary Norman and guest star Galina Samatsova was not quite as good. They were equal in height and stature, but Norman seemed preoccupied and nowhere near as convincing as Stretton in his part, while Samotsova as Odette was as dry and brittle as a packet of crisps. Her balances and attack for the part of Odile, the malevolent Odette alter ego in

Act III was much more attuned to her hard and brilliant style of dancing.

But far and away, all things being considered, the finest Odette/Odile of the lot of them was Vanessa Harwood, hailing from the National Ballet of Canada. I hope Australia sees more of her, she is a dream, and one soon due to become a star of international standing. She points the line of a dance, she phrases it with exactitude and perfect graciousness. As Odette she fell into the Prince’s embrace, as Odette she didn’t just rise en pointe, she hit it. From soft melancholy to cold, glittering allure and back again in the final act. A masterly interpretation. Kelvin Coe opposite her was sure, fleet and an admirable partner, but he just didn't project, he rarely does.

He treated Harwood as just another ballerina, the lack of identification with both role and story was obvious.

A pity it was missing something, the dancing was marvellous, but the sense of convincing realism was not apparent with this team (together) as it was from Stretton and Kirkaldie.

The latter partnership 1 hope to see in Romeo and Juliet this year in Sydney. They’ve been tried out in other cities in this particular ballet

before. When I saw Stretton as Romeo back in 1975, I noted his promise. By now he’s undoubtedly matured, as has Kirkaldie. When they appear together this time. I’m sure the partnership will be something to watch out for.

The season for Sydney includes Spartacus, Mamzelle Angot, La Fille Mai Gardee and Romeo and Juliet. Other works include Jerome Robbins’ Faune works by new wave European choreographers Jiri Kylian and Louis Falco as well as Australian, Graeme Murphy. Later on the Company will appear at the Spoleto Festival in an evening of works tailored to the music of Janacek (this year’s theme apparently). Murphy will be choreographing something of Janacek’s Sinfonietta. From Spoleto the Company embarks on a tour of Israel.

All very prestigious I would imagine, but unless there are enough good dancers to take the place of those who have defected, I don’t think the move will be greatly to the Company’s benefit. One only hopes that the Sydney season will uncover some new raw talent in the home team otherwise there will have to be some hefty recruitment from overseas.

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Opera

David Gyger

A total success or half a disaster This year’s summer season of The Australian Opera at the Sydney Opera House was either a total success or half a disaster, depending to a considerable degree on how you feel about heavily subsidised grand opera companies delving into the realms of operetta.

Even those who, like me, doubt seriously the wisdom of the AOs of this world presenting Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow and its ilk had to concede the whole exercise was perhaps almost worth while for the undeniable pleasure of seeing Joan Sutherland perform the title role, even if it afforded her grossly minimal opport­ unities to display her incredible vocal artistry.

Other aspects of the production were a good deal less inspiring.

Neither of the season’s Danilos, Ron Stevens and Pieter van der Stolk, was anywhere near as dashing and debonair as the role demands, though Stevens came a good deal closer to that mark once he had settled thoroughly into the production. Anson Austin shone as Camille de Rosillon, setting a new personal standard in vocal beauty and dramatic credibility. Isobel

Buchanan was vocally ravishing as Valencienne, if marginally immature dramatically.

The host of minor character roles were filled superbly by a proliferation of AO principals, demonstrating once again the wealth of talent possessed by the company. Particularly worthy of note was Rosina Raisbeck’s Praskovia, a gem of a dragon lady caricature worthy of the wildest extravagances of the Gilbert and Sullivan genre.

The major trouble with this Widow was the venue: the concert hall at the Opera House is simply not hospitable to operetta with spoken dialogue. Despite discrete — too discrete — amplification, few of the spoken words came across to most of the audience. The effect would probably have been much more satisfactory in a proscenium arch situation; but of course the opera theatre at the Opera House was unavailable during this period due to work on the enlargement of its orchestra pit.

Within the limits of the venue, Kristian Fredrikson’s set design was most effective, particularly from the dress circle where its essential bulk (to mask off the permanent seating behind the stage proper) was less noticeable; and

the costuming was splendidly opulent, changing its color scheme from each act to the next.

It was a long evening, due to the restoration of some usual cuts, the addition of a rather extensive (but well conceived, if not impeccably executed) ballet at the beginning of the third act, and the inclusion in this act of two arias not usually heard.

Finally, though, the greatest joy of the evening was to experience Sutherland the comic actress. She delivered her spoken lines with obvious enjoyment, considerable nuance, and utmost clarity: had the rest done half so well, the overall result would have been a good deal harder to fault.

Even those who had serious reservations about the choice of The Merry Widow for inclusion in this all concert hall summer season could hardly have objected to the choice of Verdi’s Nabucco as its stable mate; and indeed it pretty well lived up to advance expectations.

This was a semi-new production incorporating the costumes of Tom Lingwood’s 1971 proscenium arch production for The Australian Opera as well as two of its male leads, Robert

Joan Sutherland (The Widow), Gordon Wilcock (Baron Zeta), John Germain (Count Kromow) and Donald Solomon (Count Pritschilch) in the AO’s Merry Widow.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

41

Ron Stevens (Danilo) in the AO’s Merry Widow.

Allman in the title role and Donald Shanks as the high priest Zaccaria.

Lingwood’s new set design to suit the concert hall situation is simple yet starkly effective in establishing the mood of the piece as soon as the audience enters the hall: a single enormous flight of steps, black and sombre, aimed directly at the audience, with a huge darkly glittering Star of David suspended high above the performing area.

The scene changes are minimal when compared with the spectacular visual trickery of Lingwood’s 1975 Aida. This is no fault in itself, perhaps, since the demands of Nabucco are inherently much less spectacular; though there were perhaps too few visual clues to make it clear to those who had not read their plot summaries in advance that the action was moving from a temple to various parts of 42

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Nabucco's palace and to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in quick succession. But Nabucco’s first entrance, silhouetted many times larger than life against a white curtain high above the rest of those on stage, was highly impressive; as was the burning of the temple at the end of Act I, with the whole vaulted ramparts of the concert hall going up in projected flames in full view of the audience.

Both Allman and Shanks were in fine voice and impressive acting form, further refining the already excellent performances they had given in this opera in its earlier version. Lone KoppelWinther was a thoroughly committed Abigaille dramatically, but lacks a measure of the vocal resources necessary to do full justice to the rapidly changing demands of the part in purely histrionic terms.

Margreta Elkins was an interesting newcomer

to the cast in the role of Fenena, using the dark lower reaches of her rich mezzo to fine effect to give the character far more weight and importance than she sometimes has. Though occasionally the role may have been a trifle high, she showed no noticeable signs of difficulty in coping with its vocal demands on opening night.

Lamberto Furlan was a very good Ismaele though of course the part is very much overshadowed vocally by the three main protagonists who get just about all the vocal fireworks to themselves.

Bernd Benthaak’s production was very successful in conveying a real sense of fluidity of action, aided immensely by the flight of steps which made it possible to freeze performers in spectacular instants of action and allow them to belt out their thrillingly vehement torrents of sound against Verdi’s excitingly syncopated orchestral backing.

In the proscenium arch situation, this physical arrangement would not have worked because anyone very far up the steps would have been swallowed vocally by the stage tower; but in the concert hall it worked marvellously. Similarly, the chorus was most impressive throughout — but particularly, of course, in its famous big moment, Va pensiero, when the captive Hebrew slaves sing in typical Verdi style of the delights of freedom, homeland and religious zeal.

Richard Bonynge's conducting was sensitive and accurate throughout, and the Elizabethan Sydney Orchestra responded well. Bonynge’s overall interpretation leaned a little too far for my taste toward the lyrical side of the spectrum as opposed to the fire-and-brimstone side, making the score sound at times uncannily more like Bellini or Donizetti than the fairly unsubtle early Verdi it is.

There were of course musical compensations in terms of pure beauty of sound; but here and there I found myself lamenting the loss of a significant amount of the enormous dramatic impact built into the work.

Space prevents me from reviewing in detail any of the large number of year-end productions I was able to see in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Innisfail, as well as The Australian Opera’s Gilbert and Sullivan season at the Sydney Opera House and a couple of productions by the minor Sydney opera groups.

Brief mention of three highlights must suffice: 1. Robin Lovejoy’s production for the Victoria State Opera of Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande in November, under the masterful musical direction of Richard Divall, starring Yvonne Kenny, Graeme Wall, John Pringle and Noel Mangin.

2. Ken Healey's Canberra/Innisfail realisation of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, especially for the superb performances of Tom Allan in the title role and Belia Allen (no relation) as the boy’s mother.

3. Bernd Benthaak’s staging in the round of the colonial revue, Australian Yesterdays, for Roger Coveil’s University of New South Wales Opera late in October.

Elizabeth Riddell / Terry Owen

Film

Summerfield and Beyond

Elizabeth Alexander and Nick Tate in Summerfield.

And who has star quality ? The two names that come off the top of the head are Helen Morse and John Waters.

Just before beginning this article I was browsing through the film sections of the London heavies (Observer, Sunday Times and so on) mostly to discover what the critics had to say about Ken Russell’s film, Valentino, when I came on some remarks about Caddie.

Caddie started a run in London early in October. One critic wrote: "Caddie is quaintly sentimental. . . taking not much more than swipe at old-time beeriness, with a covert plea for the nursey facilities which the modern Australian woman has probably still not got.

Caddie has a very pretty performance by Helen Morse."

Another: “Nothing much happens by the standards of soap opera but all the life-size small defeats and minor victories of existence hold our interest without flagging. Helen Morse, an actress of star quality, makes Caddie a tousled beauty whom it is a pleasure to follow down deadends, through inconclusive friendships and quarrels, celebrations and disappointments until she disappears seven years later in the Depression, a free and independent woman one

would have been proud to have known."

There are two points to be made from this.

One is that some Australian films get shown in Britain and some get reviewed and some get good reviews, for instance Picnic at Hanging Rock, Caddie and (most of all) The Devil's Playground. (Films actually travel better than books. Among the only novels from Australian sources to be reviewed recently in London, have been Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows and Frank Moorhouse’s Tales o f Mystery and Romance, which were published in London by Collins and Angus and Robertson and a ten years old Thomas Kenneally, a reprint of The Survivors, also published by Collins.)

The other point is the use of the phrase “star quality”. Star quality will come to mean more and more on the domestic market as well as overseas.

And who has star quality? The two names that come off the top of the head are Helen Morse and John Waters. That is, people will go to a cinema to see them regardless of the film.

They are the performers the audience is

watching even when they are merely on the edge of the action. For instance, in Summerfield.

Waters held the attention while sitting doing nothing, with a lute unplayed in his arms, while Nick Tate and Michelle Jarman were talking and “acting".

Which is not to say that Nick Tate did not do as well as the script allowed him in Summerfield. But some changes in personality and performance will have to be made before he actually “commands” the screen. 1 shouldn't be surprised if they happen.

Stars are accidental, but the industry needs them. It also needs star-spotters, and managers and promoters, people who will see talent and who will be willing to sweat on it, to last the boring unproductive distance between vision and accomplishment. They will of course also have to overcome the performer's ego (which will assure him or her that there is nothing to learn, that it all comes naturally) and educate actors in the need to understand the body, and how physical minuses can be turned into pluses, vague attainments into positive talents.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

43

Which brings us to Summerfield. Summerfield has a lot of things going for it — it is contemp­ orary, for a change; it has a magical setting in Phillip and Churchill Islands; it has John Waters; it has Nick Tate, interesting to watch again after his masterly depiction (awarded with a Sammy) of the nicely ockerish Brother in The Devil’s Playground; it has the remarkable (star quality coming up?) Elizabeth Alexander, a cool and talented beauty; it has a cute kid, Michelle Jarman; it has Bud Tingwell’s country doctor, all tweed and bird-watching. Add splendid camera work by Mike Molloy, and that seems a lot.

What it doesn’t have is a good script, and because it doesn't have a good script it doesn’t have good direction. Or could good direction have saved it from banality, silliness, false clues, scenes that lead nowhere? And that includes not setting a mood, and not getting the genetic facts right. It is simply not true that incest, any more than mating with cousins, produces hereditary defects.

So once you get the story wrong, and once you start laying false trails, what is there? Well, there are those nice things I mentioned earlier.

I am not however presuming to say that Summerfield won’t get audiences. I caught it at a morning session in a Sydney cinema. The place was about two thirds full of the kind of people who go to morning cinema — mature males and females without jobs, or on shiftwork, or on holiday. They were an appreciative audience, with goodwill towards the Australian movie, which is in itself a reflection of how far we have

come. Because a year or so ago that kind of audience would not have been seen dead at an Australian film, and would never have encounted the Summerfield cast except on television.

But it was clear from the conversation of people behind me — there is a theory that people now talk all through movies because they have grown accustomed to talking all through television in their living rooms — that they expected something to come of, for instance, our hero's ambiguous conversation with the policeman; that they were puzzled how anybody could get the car from the sea below the cliffs into a shed in a paddock; that they didn’t understand the significance of the artefact that went boom-boom; that they thought the incessant introduction of bird life was significant. And that, like me, they soon caught on to the “mystery” of the child's father.

The few months leading up to Christmas were very busy for filmmakers. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant o f Jimmy Blacksmith, shot in the New England District of N.S.W. and on the central coast, took sixteen weeks and SI.2 million. The Mango Tree, from Ronald McKie’s book of the same name, produced by Michael Pate and directed by Kevin Dobson on a budget of $650,000 with a lot of familiar names — Christopher Pate, Gloria Dawn, Robert Helpmann, Geraldine Fitzgerald (imported) and Gerard Kennedy — was struggling to get exposure in time for Christmas. The Night the Prowler, Jim Sharman’s film of the Patrick

White short story of the same title, got going in November. The Irishman, starring Michael Craig and some splendid Clydesdales and written and directed by Donald Crombie (who directed Caddie) finished in the spring, with a $685,000 budget. Hugh Atkinson’s novel about the prejudices latent in small country towns (a theme that has served a lot of American filmmakers well in its time) was made into a movie called Weekend o f Shadows directed by Tom Jeffrey (who made the ill-fated The Removalists about four years ago) with John Waters and Melissa Jaffer. And there is Dawn, with Ken Hannam (Summerfield) directing, on a budget of $735,000; Newsfront, written by the redoubtable Bob Ellis for a half million dollar budget, about the days of Cinesound and Fox Movietone whose works, mixed judiciously with overseas clips of royalty, presidents and sinking ships, used to precede the feature in move houses in the good old days.

Late last year the Australian Film Com­ mission released a list of projects which had been given the go ahead (that is, the cash) for script development and pre-production, and for pro­ duction. These included Space Trip; Mary Loves Peter Loves Paul; The Ridge and the River, from Tom Hungerford's book, Four Wheel Drive; A ll the King's Horses; Daisy Bates; The Odd Angry Shot (from a novel about the Vietnam War by William Nagle); The Rowan Connection; The Last Tasmanian; Patrick, and Sparks were also pending.

The Bucks Party

and it's a hell of a lot better than some established Australian directors’ second and third feature films. Granted that at forty five minutes, it’s around half the usual feature length and therefore not justly to be compared directly with features, it’s a copybook example of a good dramatic idea being given small scale treatment appropriate to available local resources and coming off very successfully because of, rather than in spite of, those resources.

Steve Jodrell, who is a part time actor, part time stage director, part time film maker and full time lecturer in film and television at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, made the film in 1976 with an all amateur cast and a production budget of $15,000, including $12,000 from the-Australian Film Commission’s Experimental Film and Television Fund. As its title says, it’s about that strange Australian male ritual, the pre-wedding booze up with the mates which has delivered a lot of Aussie grooms sick as dogs to their loving brides.

Jodrell’s buck's party takes place in a secluded bush setting, with a sparkling river pool and old straggly gums as the peaceful backdrop to the noisy, crude and mindlessly violent games Ron and his mates play with their friend Kenny, the groom. There’s a vengeful edge to the humiliating nastinesses they deal out to Kenny and anyone else in the mob who looks or acts ‘a bit different’. We feel that edge, and Jodrell’s

story telling, assisted by David Rapsey’s editing, makes those of us with a speculative turn of mind want to ask why some Australian males are locked into these social stereotypes. The film clearly offers its own point of view on this question, but it also makes space for the viewer’s creative imagination to get to work driving home after the film in the drunken Friday night traffic.

The director handles action very well indeed for a beginner, and the two nastiest scenes, one involving a stripper and the other a drunken ‘accident’, are totally convincing. Jodrell says that almost everything in the movie has happened at various bucks' parties he’s been to, and his film makes you believe them.

Tony Buckley, one of Australia’s foremost film producers and editors, saw the film during its sellout opening season at Cinema 16, the new screening area in the Perth Institute of Film and Television complex at Fremantle. Buckley said the film is the most powerful statement about the Australian male since Wake In Fright, and he took a print back to Sydney with him, with the aim of getting it blown up to 35mm to give it a chance to get full commercial theatre release as a support.

The next step for Jodrell is into the bigtime full length feature, so watch for his name among the credits over the next year or two.

The Bucks Party is Western Australian writer/director/producer Steve Jodrell’s first film, 44 THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Elizabeth Riddell

Terry Owen

Records

Roger Coveil

Rossini and Elizabeth I of England Rossini’s Elisabetta, Regina d ’Inghilterra is an opera that could give a nasty surprise to an inattentive or under informed radio announcer.

It begins with a piece of music that everyone knows as the overture to The Barber o f Seville.

Rossini’s use of it for Elisabetta was an earlier occasion; but it will be some time, even with the help of the first complete recording of the opera (Philips 6703 067; 3 discs), before it shares its well-known comic identity with Rossini’s serious opera on the subject of the first Queen Elizabeth and her relationship with the Earl of Leicester.

Elisabetta was an unusually splendid and opulent piece designed by its composer to quell the jealous suspicions directed towards him by the Neapolitans on the grounds that he was a foreigner who had gained his reputation elsewhere. Rossini writes none of the secco recitative with keyboard accompaniment alone which had been standard in most operas up to this time. The recitatives in Elisabetta are always accompanied by the orchestra. Further, Rossini appears to have begun with this opera his practice of writing out in full all the embellishments which singers had formerly added to the vocal line according to their own taste and fluency. Rossini’s object was not to stop embellishment but to keep it within bounds and to make sure that it was relevant to the shape of the original melodic line. Sometimes the regularity and symmetry of Rossini’s written-out vocal ornamentation may repel us by its seemingly mechanical profusion on the printed page. When the singers are in command of the notes, however, and are not merely bullied by them the effect can be utterly enchanting. The music needs great singers; and these from all the evidence available must be much rarer now than they were in Rossini’s lifetime.

Montserrat Caballe, who takes the role of Elisabetta is certainly among the most illustrious of present day singers; and she understands Rossini’s style, as she has demonstrated on previous recordings and as she proves in this new recording, notably in the marvellous scene of resignation and renunciation with which it ends. Her voice is not always as beautiful an instrument as it once was; and some of her particularly ferocious accents in this recording are not very pleasant to hear.

In general, nevertheless, this is singing worthy of the music and worthy of this first recording.

Jose Carreras, Caballe’s protege, sings the part of Leicester with his characteristically young, not over-polished vigour. Valerie Masterson, an English singer of talent, is Matilde, a daughter of Mary Stuart whom Leicester is supposed to have married, thereby risking deep disgrace and even death from Elizabeth. The lingering inheritance of the castrato tradition in Rossini’s music declares itself in the assigning of the part of

Enrico, Matilde’s brother, to a mezzo-soprano.

Unusually, the principal villain of the opera, the Duke of Norfolk, is another tenor and so is the sympathetic captain of the guard. The opera’s need for three tenors and no baritones or basses is the sort of circumstance that makes many opera companies shy away nervously from the task of reviving the serious operas of Rossini.

This recording has a good cast, an excellent chorus (the Ambrosian Singers) and a first class orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, all conducted with sympathy and flair by Gianfranco Masini. I recommend the set as long as any prospective listener to it is not worried by its travesty of history. The court librettist at Naples wrote the text, it seems, out of his memory of a stage play he had attended on a similar subject and no doubt added his own fancies to the liberties the play took with history.

Rossini no more worried about historical accuracy than he felt abashed at borrowing music from his own earlier work. The overture itself (the one which is now attached in most people’s minds to The Barber o f Seville) was slightly adapted from an overture written two years earlier for an opera called Aureliano in Palmira. For that matter, he used part of Elisabetta’s entrance aria for a section of Rosina’s famous cavatina, Ena voce poca fa in The Barber. Rossini was incidentally appalled when he first realised that his music would be subjected to the process of being printed in a collected edition and he would have been equally dismayed to think that it would have been possible, increasingly, for us to compare each of his operas on disc. He wrote for an opera industry in which the only interesting opera was the next one and he never had any thought at the time of writing for posterity or eternity.

Handel wrote his Royal Fireworks Music to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle at a performance in Vauxhall Gardens, London.

Because King George II is known to have been anxious that the instruments involved should belong to the military tradition there is reason to believe that the original version was for woodwind, brass and drums only. Michel Piguet and his woodwind ensemble together with the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble have recorded the Fireworks Music with forces close to its original specifications (Erato STU 70944), but with reductions in numbers (sixteen oboes instead of the original twenty four, for example). I believe that the suite sounds better in this original form than in the various arrangements in which it is normally played in the concert hall.

I cannot give an outright recommendation to the sound of this disc. The tone it gives off is rather shallow, lacking the full presence and flavour that an ensemble of this kind should have been able to achieve on record. The much

older disc of the same wind-and-percussion scoring conducted by Charles Mackerras and complying much more closely with the full wind specifications of the original (Mackerras gathered the players together from the leading London orchestras, I understand, after concert hours in a late night session) is still preferable and may be available still on the Pye label. It is at least listed in the latest catalogue I have to hand. If you can’t get hold of the Mackerras recording on Pye, then at least this recent disc is worth hearing and includes some more music scored for military or quasi-military instrumental formations by Lully, J.P. Krieger, Telemann and Handel himself.

Argo has reissued on disc (and also on cassette) a beautifully performed selection of twelve of the collection of madrigals composed in honour of Elizabeth I and entitled The Triumphs o f Oriana (ZK 25). If you have a dim recollection of reading in an older history of music that the collection was intended not for Elizabeth but for Anne of Denmark, be assured that musical research has since disproved that particular theory and restored the collection to the great queen. Furthermore — though this is much more debatable — there is now a theory that the Oriana madrigals were intended for a festive performance at a ceremonial tournament. If the madrigals were indeed meant for. a festive court performance it is at least possible that the singers would have been reinforced by instruments. Taking this hint as his cue, Grayston Burgess on this disc directs not only the Purcell Chorus of Voices, but also the London Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble and the Elizabethan Consort of Viols. It is an old fallacy that madrigals of this period were invariably sung unaccompanied. The descriptions and surviving scores of many entertainments of the period, not to mention the surviving court accounts, make it abundantly clear that the festive madrigal was a different kind of piece and was presented with the utmost splendour and variety of resources, in contrast to the madrigal intended for domestic or non-festive use. There is a certain amount of what some listeners might call gimmickry on this record: noises of crowds, tournament effects, a couple of readings from George Peele’s Anglorum Feriae, and so on. But these can always be eliminated after a first hearing and they in no way intrude on the music proper. Four anonymous instrumental pieces give variety to the recording. The best of the Oriana madrigals are among the greatest achievements of the English madrigal school; and it is good to hear them sung with such vigour and skill and without the precious twittering that sometimes passes for madrigal singing.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

45

John McCallum

Plays Volume I (Eva Perón, The Homosexual, The Four Twins, Lorretta Strong), by Copi.

John Calder, $4.50.

East, Agamemnon, The Fall o f the House o f Esher (Playscript 78) by Steven Berkoff. John Calder, $11.50.

Truganinni (Australian Theatre Workshop 15),

by Bill Reed. Heinemann Educational, $2.25.

Destiny, by David Edgar. Eyre Methuen, $3.00.

Marcus Brutus, Silver Queen Saloon (Playscript 77), by Paul Foster. John Calder, $12.75.

Gimme Shelter & Abide With Me, by Barrie Keeffe. Eyre Methuen, $3.00.

Goethe said that there is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste. These 6 books, containing 17 scripts, are presumably a random collection, coming as they do from different publishers to the offices of this magazine in time for this issue, but they go together to illustrate his aphorism — both as examples of some of the less attractive products of unbridled imagination, and as illustrations of the complexity of the issue of taste. And if there is an area which can bring out imaginative excesses, it is violent, sexual or violently sexual human behaviour, which in one way or another form the subject of all these plays.

To renew a collection of playscripts is like reviewing recipes — there’s no way of telling what might become of them in the hands of the artists for whom they are written. What seems unpleasant or unworkable to read might on the stage prove theatrically revealing and exciting.

In the publisher’s blurb to the volume of Copi scripts it is claimed that although they “may not be to every taste”, they “could never be described as boring or untheatrical.” Indeed, if the chief aim of a play is to avoid boring the audience, then there is every sign in these scripts 46

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Books

of great theatrical interest. Goethe perhaps lived in a simpler age when everyone was presumed to have more or less the same idea of what was good taste.

Copi is an Argentinian designer, cartoonist and playwright, who also has acted in his plays.

The final script in this volume, Loretta Strong, is a weird surrealistic monologue which he performed in Washington (as part of the French to the American Bicentennial celebrations) wearing only high-heeled shoes and green bodypaint. As with all the scripts in this book there are no stage directions, and it is interesting to speculate on what exactly he did on stage as Loretta; in her strange Burroughs-like spaceship, as rats crawl up her vagina in pursuit of sexual gratification and get tangled between her lights and her liver. The cover shows Copi prancing naked with a giant rat attached to his groin. The other plays are equally intriguing. Part of the point of leaving out stage directions is to stimulate a director or actors to capture the manic sexual energy of these scripts in the specific conditions of their theatre and with the specific inhibitions of themselves and their audiences in mind. It is suggested, for example, that the title role in Eva Peron, and Mme Garbo in The Homosexual, may be played by women or by men in drag: according to taste. The most coherent and interesting of the scripts is The Four Twins, which shows four women (or men, presumably) repeatedly shooting up heroin and killing each other in an endless comic nightmare, again reminiscent of William Burroughs.

From the linking of drugs and death (“I'll die young but it’s like kissing God”, Lenny Bruce said) we come to the linking of sex and violence.

Steven Berkoffs “loving appreciation of the male and female form” in East finds sexual energy released in violence in London’s East End. The characters speak in an odd and powerful mixture of Cockney slang and Shakespearian diction and allusion. (“My pure and angel face, my blessed boat did, on that sacred night receive his homage. . .red did flow — I knew my cheek was gaping open like a flag”, begins a description of a knife-fight in Jack the Ripper territory.) Agammemnon and The Fall o f the House o f Usher are horrific retellings of their originals.

Bill Reed’s trilogy, Truganinni, presents aspects of the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines and compares the violent rape practised by the whites with the quiet will-to-die which stopped the tribes breeding when they were transferred to Flinders Island. The third play of the three, King Billy’s Bones, is about the desecration of the corpse of the last male of the

race (and that of Truganinni herself, who was finally cremated last year after 100 years as a museum curiosity). The treatment of the last two survivors, especially after they died, has become something of a symbol for the guilt felt about the extermination; a guilt expressed by Bill Reed and examined last year in Robert Drewe’s novel The Savage Crows.

Destiny, by David Edgar, is a dystopian political drama showing the rise of a neo-fascist party in England — the Nation Forward Party, a familiar sounding name. It is the most con­ ventional of this group of plays, ending with a neat and effective way of saying: this could happen — it’s up to us to stop it now. Except for an early scene in which these respectable English workers and businessmen stand around toasting Hitler and pledging their loyalty to him in German it is all too credible. It is a pity in a way that such a great effort is made to present both sides of the case, the play relying for its impact on an automatic horror-response to fascism. A slight twist could make it pro-fascist.

Paul Foster is an early product of New York’s La Mama theatre. His play Marcus Brutus is about a playwright trying to write a play about Marcus Brutus; which seems a fairly thin idea but if novelists can spend so much time writing about novelists writing novels there seems no reason why playwrights can’t do the same thing.

Foster’s play is slightly more than a piece of self­ searching. It pretends to explore the events which drive a rational man, such as Brutus, to murder — but with the surrealistic relationship between the playwright (in the play) and his characters it turns out to be the playwright (which one? one wonders) who is driven to a symbolic murder, rational though he feels he is.

The playwright’s (in the play) moll wanders in every now and then bringing him cartons of wonton soup as he wrestles, almost literally, with his characters. In return for what she considers unorthodox sexual favours he lets her play Cleopatra. The play is probably a lot funnier than it reads and there is an element of self-parody which leavens its self-indulgence.

Gimme Shelter, by Barrie Keeffe, is another trilogy — less formally adventurous than Reed’s and more successful in a safe sort of way. It deals with the defiance of unsuccessful members of the English working class whose small talents and aspirations are ignored or wasted by a system that leaves little room for them. Whereas Steven Berkoffs characters react with violence and energy., Keeffe’s falter and subside into their misery and frustration. In Abide With Me they devote their energies to the institutionalized rebelliousness of the football fan’s rampage.

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Drama News 1977-78 No Charge Enclosed $__________ N a m e _______________________ A ddress.

D r a m a N e w s — details of all books on Cinema, Theatre and Plays from Eyre Methuen of London. Write for your copy.

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

47

International Desmond O’Grady W here are the playwrights? or

Sixty million characters in search of an author.

A sign in a Neapolitan bus spoke volumes: “Don’t talk to the driver — he needs his hands for steering”. In Italy, theatre is readily found in the streets. There is also the public theatre acted out by politicians whose spectacle is rather like a Kabuki play seen by a foreigner: verbose, incomrehensible, dull but when it seems nothing will ever happen, there are rapid, dramatic events.

But there is life in Italian theatre as well as theatricality in Italian life. There is intense theatrical activity and a paucity of playwrights.

It is largely a directors’ theatre whether in plush locales or in the innumerable converted garages and basements of the Roman “off-off’.

The most memorable productions I have seen in recent years were both directors’ triumphs.

One was Luca Ronconis' Orlando Furioso, the other Franco Enriquez’s Kasimir and Karoline.

Ronconi worked with Eduardo Sanguinetti’s stage version of Ariosto's epic poem. It was presented in Rome’s covered sports stadium with wheeled wooden horses trundled impetuously on stage and fantastical creatures sustained by wires overhead. A scene would begin but before it finished audiences would be drawn elsewhere by a spectacular entry of, say, a mounted knight vowing heroic feats... Spectators ambled among the various islands of action dazzled by the magical and marvellous, horrified by the horrid, plunged into Ariosto’s world.

Enriquez staged Odin von Horvath’s 1932 play in Rome’s Tent theatre. A five-piece orchestra played music composed for the occasion and, in what seemed a director’s innovation, slides were projected on Hitler’s rise to power which gave a deeper dimension to the girl-meets-disreputable-boys story.

My experiences with avant-garde directors have been less than ecstatic. I have missed out on Giancarlo Nanni, who works mainly in Genoa, but the highly-quoted Meme Perlini seems to have mainly a repertoire of tiresome gimmicks (use of almost total darkness, nerveracking noises, or variations on the appearances/reality theme) designed to terrorise spectators, while another prominent avant-garde director, Mario Ricci, makes charming use of masks, mime and film projections but he does 48

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

being performed. What is being sought, it seems, is writers working with a company in which mutual respect is mutually beneficial.

A step in this direction will be made with the season of nine contemporary Italian plays to be presented in Rome from November. The Italian Drama Institute has decided that rather than continue to give small grants to many companies it will provide $3-5000 to companies which will present a three-week season of a new play in Rome and then tour it.

One of the plays is Don Juan by Dacia Maraini, the best-known writer associated with Rome's feminist theatre. A well-known novelist and film director, Alberto Bevilacqua, is joint author of another of the plays Police is Beautiful, a monologue by a proletarian policeman.

The nine-play season is a pointer to the paucity of contemporary Italian works in the major theatres. Shakespeare figures prominently there. Some interesting work has been done in stressing the Italian originals of Shakespearian characters but it is not clear whether this will be an aspect of this season’s The Tempest which Giorgio Strehler will stage in Milan; Carmelo Bene’s Richard III; Proclemer and Albertazzi in Anthony and Cleopatra; L'Aquila Repertory’s A s You Like It; and Measure fo r Measure at the Rome municipal theatre which will also present Brecht’s Terror and Misery o f the Third Reich and Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

Classics are the staple: three big Moliere productions are listed in this Italian season, which began in October, while Goldoni’s

Alcena The Witch. Photo: G.B. Poletto. not seem to have anything urgent to express.

Perhaps my prejudice is showing: I am for a theatre of words, a theatre in which words’ essential role is recognised whereas much of the Italian avant garde is determinedly anti-word.

It is partly an attempt to liberate Italian theatre from the literary. Academic and literary traditions are so powerful that plays are considered proclamations of speeches shaped by authors in magnificent isolation; this was the accusation recently made by directors when the discussion revived on “why are there so few Italian playwrights”, which could also be called “sixty million characters in search of an author”.

Writers snapped back. Novelist Goffredo Parise claimed Italians understood only gestural not metaphoric theatre. He claimed they wanted the identification of actor and person which means only writer-actors, such as the Neapolitan Eduardo de Filippo or the extreme leftwinger Dario Fo, could emerge. An Italian Beckett would not stand a chance, Parise concluded, which explains why most writers are not tempted to try their hand.

Mutual accusations between theatre people and writers have not prevented works of wellknown writers (Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Giovanni Testori, Enzo Siciliano)

The Battle o f Paris. Photo: G.B. Poletto.

Gemelli (the same theme as A Comedy o f Errors) is being presented in Rome.

Three Pirandello plays were staged in Rome in November: Vestire gli ignudi, Como, la bestia, la virtu, and Enrico IV. It marked a resurgence of interest in Italy’s most challenging modern playwright who does not seem to have any heirs.

A glance at the bigger companies’ playbills shows that people are not going to theatres for reflection on how they live. But efforts are being made to find a new relationship between audiences and theatre through decentralisation of performances. This summer, for the first time, Rome municipal theatre gave open-air, night performances in schools in outer suburbs whose inhabitants would never think of attending the inner-city theatres.

A new audience, it is argued, will revitalise Italian theatre. Luca Ronconi is at work to create a new audience, and a new relationship between theatre and territory, in a triennial experimental project which is underway at Prato, near Florence.

An iron, rather than a theatrical, curtain seems to protect Ronconi’s project from view but indications are that it is as elaborate as Peter Brook’s International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. Brook, with Ford Foundation help, went through a million dollars behind closed doors. Money for theatre in Italy is scarce as hen’s teeth but Ronconi is doing well, thank you, with a yearly research budget of $77,000.

Continuedfrom Page 11

ILLU SIO N C O M IQ U E Rex Cramphorn does not feel at home in the routine mode of production in Australia. His own method is to work with a single group of actors for a long time, developing a script as he works, and performing it again and again, often in different production styles.

‘In the old days, people used to say that our production of The Tempest formed some bridge between Australia and Asia. That’s a feeling I want to have, an instinct for that aspiration.

“The old days”. . . it’s pretty bizarre, but for a moment there was the Performance Syndicate when we all went around between ’70 and ’74. It was the best time because I was working with a group of people. Yes, I’d like to set up a group of my own like that again. I know a lot of actors who would like to work like that. Yet no grant givers or management want to back it. In those four years it was even against Australia Council policy. They wanted to give only project grants or grants administered by bodies’.

Perhaps this is what comes out of the Old Tote experience. That the structure of theatre funding in Australia, now at a set level, works against any development of theatre that does not fit the pattern of a large administrative body, a

Australian Centre, International Theatre Institute 153 Dowling Street, Potts Point, N.S.W. 2011, Australia. Phone: 357-1200 President: Prof. Robert Quentin. Hon. Sec.: D'r Marlis Thieisch.

Editor: Susan Paterson

ENGLISH SUMMER THEATRE WORKSHOPS Two short course/congresses will be held simultaneously at the Middlesex Polytechnic, Trent Park, from July 21-30, 1978.

The Performance Arts Summer School offers exploratory workshops in the inter-relationship of dance, drama and music with supporting classes in the three disciplines. Day long and ongoing projects will be a feature of the programme as well as exploration of “Popular contemporary arts, dynamic personal interaction through the arts, man and miss, arts by chance, multi-media improvisation.”

The Summer School will be staffed by Polytechnic staff who have pioneered the new B.A. Performance Arts Course.

The second course offered, “Many ways of moving 1978”, focuses on the whole person, promoting a healthy body and developing movement awareness throughout our society.

For further information write to David Henshaw, Middlesex Polytechnic, Trent Park, Hertford Shire, EN40PT, England.

- US I.T.I. Newsletter, Feb., 1978.

certain number of plays a season, so-many weeks rehearsal with actors brought in for the limited occasion, and, finally, in times of austerity, new ideas and experiment sacrificed with little regret.

‘The way I work as a director, too, is not to stand there telling everybody what to do, where to stand, etc. I see it as providing myself as a kind of common denominator through which everybody can work. The trouble with working now is that I’m doing all the things I hate, telling actors whom I don’t know well “move over there” and things like that.’

He spent some weeks in Canberra in February directing an outdoor version of the Salzburg Everyman. There are other things on his calendar. An up-coming production of the Ran Dan Club, an anonymous and as yet upperformed play from 1834. Illusion Comique at the Seymour Centre, in connection with the French Department at Sydney Uni, where language students will be able to see rehearsals and view a play they are studying from the practical point.

There’s also the work at NIDA, which he sees as a kind of alternative to NIDA within NIDA. (‘There are students there who don’t want to go into television’.)

But what comes out of an interview with Rex Cramphorn, and from mulling the cynical step of the Old Tote, is that our theatre now is so lacking in varieties of approach to theatre, so

closed, by the nature of our funding and our institutions, to a different concept, even one so practised and excellent as Rex Cramphorn’s.

‘In working — back in the ideal days — I much preferred to be there and work with a writer and actors. I like old texts, where I’m free to remake the play for myself. I don’t think theatre in Australia has a bright future. It looked so good in the late ’60s. What are we doing about audiences now? I’ve still got plans. I want to do Mother Courage. It might happen through NIDA, at Jane St., about mid-year. I’m working on a film script with David Malouf, of his novel Johnno.

‘But I’ll never get to do what I want to do. No, I’d better not say that. I did really conclude that most of the ideals I had about theatre were more closely achieved years ago than recently. I even tried full-time gardening a while ago. I found there was more in plays. But I feel even now that I want to stop. I’d love to do a popular musical. I loved Chorus Line. Had a lot of arguments with people about that! I really like Bond. The Sea and The Fool both are wonderful. I can’t believe the English reviews. They’re poisonous! More than everything, I always wanted to go overseas with a group of actors. We had a Tempest that was uniquely ours, and uniquely Australian. But there was never enough push from here.

Nothing happened. That kind of ambition I find hard to let go’.

MUSIC THEATRE TRAINING An interdisciplinary encounter for singers, dancers and actors will be held at Queekhoven House, Bruekelen, Holland, from June 6th to the 25th, 1978. The organisers are the Eduart van Beimum Foundation and the Musical Theatre Committee of the I.T.I. The international team of instructors will be under the artistic direction of conductor Lars of Malmborg; Choreographer/Producer Donya Feuer (both from Stockholm); Composer Peter Schat (Amsterdam) and others.

Those interested in attending should contact this office immediately for further information.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

49

THEATRE OPERA DANCE

A .C .T .

ALBERT HALL Canberra Opera (47-0249) Papageno (one-hour version of The Magic Flute) Conductor, Keith Wilson; Director, Eileen Gray; Design, Michael Salmon. 28 March - 1 April.

THE BARD’S THEATRE RESTAURANT (47-6244) Blue Hat Productions Command Performance in honour of the visit of H.M. Edward VII on the occasion of the Federation of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Devised and directed by Gordon Todd, with Monsieur Frederick. Thursdays to Saturdays (continuing).

CHILDERS STREET HALL A Stretch o f the Imagination by Jack Hibberd.

Director, Ralph Wilson; Monk, Harry Schmidt.

28 March - 1 April, April 4-8. Proceeds to A.N.U. Arts Centre.

CANBERRA THEATRE (49-7600) Canberra Philharmonic Society The White Horse Inn. Conductor, Don Whitbread; Producer, Bill Stephens; Guest Artist, Brian Crossley as Grinkle. April 6-8, 1215.

JIGSAW COMPANY (47-0781) In repertory; A ct Now, a documentary for adults, on self-government in the A.C.T.; Crumpet and Co., a participation play for children; The Empty House, a participation play for preschools. Various locations.

TIVOLI THEATRE RESTAURANT (49-1411) Canberra Professional Group Vaudeville Capers, devised by Tikki Taylor and John Newman; Director, Jim Hutchins. Fridays and Saturdays (continuing).

THEATRE 3 (47-4222) Canberra Rep. Music Hall. April 6-8, 13-15, 20-22, 27-29.

N EW S O U TH W A LE S ACTORS COMPANY (660-2503) Othello by William Shakespeare. Director, Mathew O’Sullivan. To 8 April.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

Director, Steve Agnew; Designer, Matthew Lorrimer. From 17 April.

ARTS COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES (31-6611) The Twenties and A ll That Jazz by John 50

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

Diedrich, Caroline Gilmer and John O’May. Director, John Diedrich. With Richard Hill, Elizabeth Mortison. David Slingsby. NSW country tour continuing to 24 April.

While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson. Starring Leonard Teale. South NSW country tour 3 April to 30 April.

Wayne Roland Brown, instrumentalist. Schools tour West NSW and Sydney continuing.

Bob Fillman and Friends.

Ventriloquist/magician/puppeteer. Schools tour Sydney, South NSW and Riverina during April.

Dale Woodward Rod Puppet Workshop.

Schools tour Hunter Valley during April.

AUSTRALIAN BALLET See Sydney Opera House.

AUSTRALIAN THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE (699-9322) Kaspajack by Richard Tulloch. Director, Des Davis — for infant schools.

The Fabulous Cappucinos by Richard Tulloch.

Director, Jane Westbrook.

Running Away by Michael Cove. Director, Raymond Omodei.

The Actor at Work in Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Director, Raymond Omodei. North West Arts tour ’78.

ENSEMBLE THEATRE (929-8877) Vanities by Jack Heisner. Director, Brian Young. During April.

GENESIAN (827-3023) Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw.

Director, Kevin Jackson. To 6 May. HER MAJESTY’S (212-3411) Othello by William Shakespeare. Chichester Festival Theatre Production. Director, Peter Dews. 10 to 15 April. 24 to 29 April.

The Applecart by George Bernard Shaw.

Chichester Festival Theatre Production.

Director, Patrick Garland. With Keith Michell, Nyree Dawn Porter and Ray Dotrice. 17 to 22 April. 1 to 6 May. MARIAN STREET (498-3166) Piaf je vous aime devised by Libby Morris.

Director, Alastair Duncan. From 8 April.

Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriss. Director, Alastair Duncan. From 14 April.

MARIONETTE THEATRE OF AUSTRALIA (357-1638) Alitji in Wonderland, written and directed by Richard Bradshaw. Sydney Western suburbs tour 3-7 April.

MUSIC HALL THEATRE RESTAURANT (909-8222) Crushed by Desire written and directed by

Michael Boddy. Continuing.

MUSIC LOFT THEATRE RESTAURANT (977-6585) Encore written and produced by Peggy Mortimer, with the Toppano family.

Continuing.

NEW ARTS THEATRE, GLEBE (660-3922) East by Steven Berkoff. Performed by the London Theatre Company. From 5 April.

NEW THEATRE (519-3403) Saved by Edward Bond. Director, Ken Boucher.

Designer, Igor Nagy.

NIMROD (69-5003) Upstairs: Curse o f the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. Director, Ken Horler. Designer, Martin Sharp. With Hugh Keays-Byrne, Carole Skinner, Malcolm Keith, Suzy Roylance, George Shevtsov, Benjamin Franklin, Ray Anderson. To 16 April.

Comedy o f Errors by William Shakespeare.

Director, John Bell. To 23 April.

NO. 86 THEATRE RESTAURANT, St Leonards (439-8533) A l Capones Birthday Party by Pat Garvey.

Director/producer, Pat Garvey. Choreography, Keith Little. Sets, Doug Anderson. Costumes, Ray Wilson. Continuing.

OLD TOTE (663-6122) Drama Theatre, Opera House: Miss Julie by August Strindberg, and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer. Director, Ted Craig. With Robyn Nevin, Trevor Kent and Judi Farr. To 11 April.

The Misanthrope by Moliere. Director Ted Craig. With Kate Fitzpatrick, Barry Otto, Russell Kiefel, Trevor Kent and Raymond Duparc. From 26 April.

Parade Theatre: Just Between Ourselves by Alan Ayckbourn. Director, Peter Collingwood.

With Peter Whitford, Joan Bruce, Jenny McNae, Alan Becher and June Thody. 5 April to 23 April.

Da by Hugh Leonard. Director, Peter Collingwood. With Tom Farley, Maggie Kirkpatrick, Alan Tobin and Clare Crowther.

From 31 April.

OSCARS HOLLYWOOD PALACE THEATRE RESTAURANT, Sans Souci.

(529-4455) Fasten Your Seat Belt by Don Battye and Peter Pinne. Director, Jon Ewing. Continuing.

Q THEATRE, Penrith (047 21 -5735) A Day in the Death o f Joe Egg by Peter Nichols.

Director, Richard Brooks. Penrith to 2 April; Bankstown 5 April to 9 April; Parramatta 12 April to 16 April.

Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn.

Director, Doreen Warburton. From 26 April.

RIVERINA TRUCKING COMPANY (069 25-2052) Babes o f '53. Music and Lyrics by Ken Moffat and Terry O’Connell. 12 April to 23 April.

Diamond Studs by Bland Simpson and Jim Wann. Wagga, 29 April to 14 May. Touring, 15 to 21 May. SEYMOUR CENTRE (692-0555) York Theatre: The Cassidy Album Trilogy. A Hard God, Furtive Love, A n Eager Hope by Peter Kenna. Director John Tasker. With Maggie Kirkpatrick, Alan Wilson, Phillip Ross, Ray Meagher, Janice Finn, Tony Sheldon, Bernie Lewis, Vic Rooney.

Everest Theatre: The Grand Adventure by Phillip Edmiston. Marionette musical show.

Schools shows 4 April to 19 April.

Downstairs: The Ran Dan Club by Theatre Workshop Cartwheel Theatre. Director, Rex Cramphorn. Designer, Russell Emerson.

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE (20-588) Opera Theatre: Australian Ballet, two programmes: Symphony in D, The Dream Caravan. Romeo and Juliet. Throughout April.

Exhibition Hall: Designers Association Exhibition. Throughout April.

THEATRE ROYAL (231-6111) M y Fat Friend by Charles Laurence. With Paula Wilcox and Bill Farley. To 8 April.

Poppy New South Wales Dance Company choreographed by Graeme Murphy. 10 April to 22 April.

Love They Neighbour Television cast. From 24 April.

WHITE HORSE HOTEL, Newtown (51-1302) The R.S.L. Show by Foveaux Kirby and Peter Stephens. Director, Ian Tasker. Designer, Peter Fisher. To 22 April.

Q U E E N S LA N D _________ ARTS THEATRE (36-2344) Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller. Director, Bill Hill. With Jenepher Debenham, Jennifer Radborne, Kevin Radbourne and Ian Thomson.

To 15 April.

The Waltz o f the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh.

Director, Yve Morrison. Designer, Max Hurley.

20 April - 20 May. The Witch, the Wizard and the Giant Cook by Eugene Hickey. Director, Barbara Webber.

Childrens Theatre each Saturday.

HER MAJESTY’S (221-2777) Othello by William Shakespeare. Chichester Festival Theatre Company production.

Director, Peter Dews. Designer, Finlay James.

28 March -1 April.

The Applecart by George Bernard Shaw.

Director, Patrick Garland. Designer, Eileen Diss. Costumes, Raymond Hughes. 3 April - 8 April.

Queensland Opera Company: The Gypsy Baron

by Johann Strauss. Director, John Thompson.

Conductor, Graeme Young. Designer, Peter Cooke. With Catherine Duval and Peter Lees.

10 April - 29 April.

LA BOITE (36-1622) The Beast by Snoo Wilson. Director/designer, David Bell. With Greg Silverman, Marina Bossov, Lorna Bol and Stewart Stubbs. To 8 April.

Young Mo by Steve Spears. Director, Rick Billinghurst. Designer, David Bell. With Rod Whissler, Kay Stevenson, Kay Perry and Sean Mee. Opens 14 April.

QUEENSLAND THEATRE COMPANY (21-5177) Don't Piddle Against the Wind, Mate by Kenneth Ross. Director, Bryan Nason.

Designer, Fiona Reilly. 5 April - 22 April.

TWELFTH NIGHT (52-5889) Not operating during April.

S O U TH A U S T R A L IA AUSTRALIAN DANCE THEATRE (212-2084) Workshop. April 6-11.

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN THEATRE COMPANY (51-5151) The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Directed by Ron Blair, designed by Richard Roberts. April 5-29.

THE STAGE COMPANY Sheridan Theatre: The Right Man by Ken Ross. Directed by John Dick. April 6-29.

STATES OPERA (51-6161) Opera Theatre: Marriage o f Figaro. Opens May 3.

T A S M A N IA THEATRE ROYAL (34-6266) The Glitter Sisters devised and written by Gary Down and Jon Finlayson. Directed and staged

by John Finlayson. 6 April - 15 April.

Showboat. Theatre Royal Light Opera Company. 21 April to 6 May. TASMANIAN PUPPET THEATRE Indonesian tour sponsored by ITepartment of Foreign Affairs. 31 March to 15 April.

Magic Shadow Show. Tasmanian schools tour 15 April to 30 April.

Rose Street, Ferntree Gully, Victoria ( 03 ) 796 8624 ( 03 ) 758 3964

OPEN AUDITION Sunday, April 16th at 7.30 p.m.

Enquiries: (03) 796-8624

—

Q theatre

A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG

by PETER NICHOLS March 1 5 - April 2 — Penrith April 5 - 9 — Bankstown Town Hall April 1 2 - 1 6 — Marsden Auditorium, Parramatta.

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR

by ALAN AYCKBOURN April 26 - May 14 — Penrith May 1 7 - 2 1 — Bankstown Town Hall May 24 - 28 — Marsen Auditorium, Parramatta.

THEQTHEATRE P.O. BOX 10, PENRITH 2750. Tel: (047) 21-5735

M A R IA N STREET THEATRE and Restaurant 2 Marian Street, Killara, 2071 498-3166 Bunny Gibson, Doug Kingsman, Maureen Elkner and Rod Dunbar in Music and Magic of Paris THE EDITH PIAF (Je vous aime) SHOW Devised by Libby Morris — Directed by Alastair Duncan

Tuesday to Saturdays at 8.15 p.m.

Dinner from 6.30 p.m. — Sunday at 4.30 p.m.

Commencing April 14th at 8.1 5 p.m. “ JOURNEY’S END” by R C Sherriff LICENCED FOYER AND RESTAURANT BARS

W E S TE R N A U S T R A L IA CIVIC THEATRE RESTAURANT (272-1595) Laughter Unlimited. Review. Director, Brian Smith.

HOLE IN THE WALL (81-2403) The Seagull by Anton Chekov. Director, Mike Morris. 17 March - 22 April.

ensemble THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

51

NATIONAL THEATRE (25-3500) Playhouse: Dusa, Fish, Stas and VI by Pam Gems.

Melbourne Theatre Company production. 30 March - 22 April.

The Club by David Williamson. Melbourne Theatre Company production. 27 April - 20 May. Greenroom: Gotcha by Barry Keefe. Director, Andrew Ross.

4 April - 22 April.

REGAL THEATRE (81-1557) N o Sex Please, W e’re British by Marriott and Foot. 30 March and continuing.

W.A.I.T. HAYMAN THEATRE (350-7026) Hitting Town by Stephen Poliakoff. Director, Stephen Barry. 5 April - 15 April.

The (next door) Vaudeville Theatre: Sparkling Vaudeville Show. Through April.

VICTORIAN STATE OPERA COMPANY (41-5061) Sid the Serpent Who Wanted To Sing produced

by Greg Shears and Betty Pounder. Music by Malcolm Fox. All schools throughout Vic. during year from April.

Australia^ magazine of the perfuming arts

H ie a ire A u s tra lia

ARTS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA in association with Clifford Hocking Enterprises, presents

PAM AYRES IN CONCERT

V IC T O R IA AUSTALIAN DANCE THEATRE National Theatre: New Work. First programme April Second programme April 25-29.

18-22.

AUSTRALIAN PERFORMING GROUP (347-7153) Pram Factory: Back to Bourke Street. A group developed show.

March 21 - April 19.

The Radio Show. Radio Show Company. April 24 - May 7.

COMEDY THEATRE (663-3211) For Coloured Girls. . . Adelaide Festival Production. March 28 on.

FIRST NATIONAL TOUR OF AUSTRALIA

HER MAJESTY’S (663-3211) Chorus Line Expected to continue through April.

HOOPLA THEATRE FOUNDATION (63-4888) Playbox Theatre: Perfect Strangers and The Christian Brothers by Ron Blair. Two plays co-produced by Nimrod and Hoopla.

N ext M onth Commercialism in subsidised theatre The Sage of Twelfth Night Reviews, Opera, Theatre, Ballet, Dance, lots more.

LA MAMA (380-4593) Stingray Play written and directed by Sun Ring.

Thurs.-Suns. April 7-30.

LAST LAUGH THEATRE RESTAURANT (419-6226) True Romances. Busby Berkeleys with Peaches La Creme and Henry Maas. Through April.

MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY (699-9122) Athenaeum: Richard The Third by William Shakespeare.

Directed by Mick Rodger. March 16 - April 29.

The Beaux Stratagem by George Farquhar.

Directed by Frank Hauser. May 4 - June 10.

Russell Street: Makassar R eef by Alex Buzo. Directed by Aarne Neeme. March 23 - May 13.

TIKKI AND JOHNS (663-1754) Tikki and John at the Musical Hall. April 1-30.

52

THEATRE AUSTRALIA APRIL 1978

26th MAY ADELAIDE (Opera Theatre) 27th MAY ADELAIDE (Opera Theatre) 30th MAY - 10th JUNE (South Aust. Country Centres) 12th JUNE - 17th JUNE MELBOURNE, CANBERRA, SYDNEY, PERTH. V en u es to be an nou nced .

O V E R S E A S S U B S C R IP T IO N R A TES S u rfa c e m a n

AS25.00

By air

New Zealand, New Guinea AS45.00 U.K., U.S.A., Germany, Greece, Italy AS50.00 All other countries AS70.00 Bank drafts in Australian currency should be forwarded to Theatre Publications Ltd., 80 Elizabeth Street, Mayfield, N.S.W. 2304, Australia.

HIT OF THE 1978 ROYAL COMMAND VARIETY PERFORMANCE Enquiries: Phone Adelaide 212-2644, Melbourne 62-4884 Pam Ayers Tour is supported by The Savings Bank of South Australia and Channel 7